xdg-open opens a different application to the one specified by xdg-mime query

I run Debian Jessie without a desktop environment (I use the tiling window manager i3) and like to use xdg-open to quickly open files using a preferred application. I have an ongoing problem setting the preferred app for PDF files though. This is my problem in a nutshell:

$ xdg-mime query filetype ~/Downloads/document.pdf
application/pdf

$ xdg-mime query default application/pdf
/usr/share/applications/qpdfview.desktop

$ xdg-open ~/Downloads/document.pdf
[opens gimp!]

Any ideas would be hugely appreciated – this has been plaguing me for about a year. The only way I’ve ever managed to (temporarily) fix it is by directly editing the mimeinfo.cache and removing the reference to gimp from the application/pdf record.

And yes, /usr/share/applications/qpdfview.desktop exists and contains the correct location of the qpdfview binary. (Indeed, this .desktop file is used when I hand-edit mimeinfo.cache.)

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Answers:

Method 1

Example

References

Answers:

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Method 1

You could attempt to manually set it via the command line using mimeopen.

Example

$ mimeopen -d ~/test.pdf

Please choose a default application for files of type application/pdf

    1) E-book Viewer  (calibre-ebook-viewer)
    2) Document Viewer  (evince)
    3) Xournal  (xournal)
    4) GNU Image Manipulation Program  (gimp)
    5) Xpdf PDF Viewer  (xpdf)
    6) Print Preview  (evince-previewer)
    7) Inkscape  (inkscape)
    8) calibre  (calibre-gui)
    9) Other...

use application #2
Opening "/home/saml/Downloads/test.pdf" with Document Viewer  (application/pdf)

Which results in my PDF file, test.pdf opening up in Evince. From this point on Evince is the default when I use xdg-open.

References

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0

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