Default Editor

Making it your default editor

This product never seizes a file association (ADR-0012). It tells you what is registered now, plans a change, shows you the plan, and hands you the means to apply it. The last step is always yours.

Look before you change anything

File > Set as Default Editor.

The screen has three parts:

1. What opens each file type today -- read from your machine, not assumed.
2. A preset, choosing which types to register for. Notepad Replacement is the modest one: plain text and logs.
3. The plan -- exactly what would be written, and where.

Nothing has happened yet.

.bpadx is not in any preset, including Notepad Replacement. It used to be in all of them, and this build opens such a file as ciphertext because it has no decryption in it. Registering a file type you cannot open is worse than not registering it (ADR-0069).

Windows

Choose a preset and confirm. You get a .reg file, written where you can find it, and beside it a second one that undoes it (see Undoing it, below). Both are UTF-16, which is what regedit expects; open them in this editor or in Notepad to read them.

Read it. It is a few lines, and it is your machine.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\...

Everything is under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. Nothing machine-wide is touched, and nothing needs administrator rights.

Double-click it, accept the prompt, then finish in Settings > Default apps -- Windows requires the final choice to be made by you, there, and no application can make it for you.

Explorer will draw the icon from bachelorpad.ico beside the executable. If you move the executable and leave the icon behind, every registered type draws blank (ADR-0068) -- move the whole folder.

Linux

Confirm, and two things are written under your home directory:

• a .desktop entry, in ~/.local/share/applications/
• a MIME package, in ~/.local/share/mime/packages/

Then run the two commands the screen names:

update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications
update-mime-database ~/.local/share/mime

They are named for you and not run for you. A program that spawns processes on your behalf is a program that can be talked into spawning a different one, and that is a line this project holds everywhere rather than only where it is convenient.

The .desktop entry points at the PNG beside the binary, for the same reason as on Windows: with no installer there is no step that could put an icon in a system theme.

Undoing it

Windows: Settings > Default apps, and set the types back. Then, to take the registration off entirely, double-click the second file written beside the first, io.github.dboles99.bachelorpluslite-remove.reg. Read it first, as before: it deletes this product's own keys, and takes only this product's values out of the keys other applications share. It also removes what builds before 1.0 registered under their earlier names, so it is the one to run if you ever registered 0.9.5.

Linux: delete the two files and run the two commands again.

This product will not remove them for you, which is the same rule as everywhere else (ADR-0070).

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This page is generated from docs/tutorials/02-default-editor.md and edits made here will be overwritten. Change the source and open a pull request.