Get various settings from the desktop environment
xdg-settings {get | check | set} {property} [subproperty] [value] xdg-settings {--help | --list | --manual | --version}
xdg-settings gets various settings from the desktop environment. For instance, desktop environments often provide proxy configuration and default web browser settings. Using xdg-settings these parameters can be extracted for use by applications that do not use the desktop environment's libraries (which would use the settings natively).
xdg-settings is for use inside a desktop session only. It is not recommended to use xdg-settings as root.
--help
Show command synopsis.
--list
List all properties xdg-settings knows about.
--manual
Show this manual page.
--version
Show the xdg-utils version information.
When using xdg-settings to get, check or set a destkop setting, properties and possibly sub-properties are used to specify the setting to be changed.
Some properties (such as default-web-browser) fully describe the setting to be changed. Other properties (such as default-url-scheme-handler) require more information (in this case the actual scheme to set the default handler for) which must be provided in a sub-property.
An exit code of 0 indicates success while a non-zero exit code indicates failure. The following failure codes can be returned:
1
Error in command line syntax.
2
One of the files passed on the command line did not exist.
3
A required tool could not be found.
4
The action failed.
Get the desktop file name of the current default web browser
xdg-settings get default-web-browser
Check whether the default web browser is firefox.desktop, which can be false even if "get default-web-browser" says that is the current value (if only some of the underlying settings actually reflect that value)
xdg-settings check default-web-browser firefox.desktop
Set the default web browser to google-chrome.desktop
xdg-settings set default-web-browser google-chrome.desktop
Set the default mailto URL scheme handler to be evolution.desktop
xdg-settings set default-url-scheme-handler mailto evolution.desktop
Mike Mammarella
Author.
Copyright © 2009-2011