Re: [Vala] Get default terminal emulator?

[Thomas Jollans <t jollybox de>]

On 06/22/2012 10:33 PM, PCMan wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 6:46 PM, Thomas Jollans<t jollybox de>  wrote:
> > Hi list,
> >
> > How do I get the user's default terminal emulator with GLib/GIO? I would
> > assume it involves GLib.AppInfo in some way, but it's not as straightforward
> > as that since there isn't really a MIME type associated with opening a
> > terminal window as far as I know.
> >
> > Is there even a freedesktop-standard way of doing this? On GNOME, I imagine
> > one could go into the depths of GSettings, but can that work for non Gnome
> > users? On Debian/Ubuntu, running x-terminal-emulator will get you the system
> > default, but that doesn't exist on other systems and disregards the user's
> > preferences.
>
> Unfortunately, no. They hard-coded a list of well-known terminal
> emulators, and try them one by one.
> This is what GAppInfo does in glib/gio. The worst thing is, there is
> no config option for this.
> The config value in gconf/gsettings does not change the behavior of GAppInfo.
> The glib/gio devs know this, but they just did not fix it.

What a mess. I assume you're talking about the run command in terminal 
functionality of GIO (which I assume exists)? Just FYI, what I'm doing 
here is simply launching the terminal emulator in a certain directory, 
in the Emperor file manager. I'm going for reading out the GSettings 
value for org.gnome.desktop.default-applications.terminal/exec, and if 
that doesn't work, falling back to xterm. Should be good enough most of 
the time.