Xdg-open preffered applications

Question

Hello, how can I change the preferred applications that xdg-open uses? For example on pdf files it will open them with firefox, I'd rather have them opened in evince.
I'm using openbox standalone and pcmanfm

Answer 1

Then I don't know what's wrong.  I suppose, however, that it would be possible to work through the various steps that xdg-open takes to open a file and see where it breaks.  For example, if I run "xdg-open Documents/Stuff/Stuff.pdf" then this is what happens:
If the DE is neither gnome, kde nor xfce then xdg-open will set
the variable $DE to "generic" and will also check $BROWSER, setting it to
"firefox:mozilla:epiphany:konqueror:chromium-browser:google-chrome:links2:links:lynx:w3m"
if it isn't set already.
If $DE is "generic" then the function open_generic will be called.
open_generic will check that the file to be opened is a file and if
it is then it will call open_generic_xdg_mime, which will do the following:
$ filetype=`xdg-mime query filetype Documents/Stuff/Stuff.pdf | sed "s/;.*//"`
$ echo $filetype
application/pdf
$ default='xdg-mime query default "$filetype"`
$ echo $default
evince.desktop
$ xdg_user_dir="$XDG_DATA_HOME"
$ xdg_system_dirs="$XDG_DATA_DIRS"
$ x=`echo "$xdg_user_dir:$xdg_system_dirs" | sed 's/:/ /g'`
We need to select the correct path manually at this point, so
$ echo $x
/home/david/.local/share /usr/share /usr/local/share
evince.desktop is in /usr/share/applications, so
$ x="/usr/share/"
$ file="$x/applications/$default"
$ command="`grep -E "^Exec(\[[^]=]*])?=" "$file" | cut -d= -f 2- | first_word`"
bash: first_word: command not found
Oops, first_word is a function
$ command="`grep -E "^Exec(\[[^]=]*])?=" "$file" | cut -d= -f 2-`"
$ echo $command
evince %U
$ command="evince"
$ command_exec=`which $command 2>/dev/null`
$ echo $command_exec
/usr/bin/evince
$ $command_exec Documents/Stuff/Stuff.pdf
** (evince:26937): WARNING **: Failed to create dbus proxy for org.gnome.SettingsDaemon: Could not get owner of name 'org.gnome.SettingsDaemon': no such name
Evince has started at this point and opened Documents/Stuff/Stuff.pdf!