How to rename an application so as to affect alphabetical order of right-click "open with" applications list?

Question

I've recently switched my default pdf viewer from acroread to qpdfview; for (serious, duplex-multipage) printing, though, I still prefer Evince (to both acroread and qpdfview).

To quickly open a pdf with Evince, I used to be able to

1. open the context-menu (by right-clicking, shift f10 or the context-menu button),
2. followed by h for "Open wit_h_" and
3. finally Enter, to open Evince, which then was the first entry in the applications list.

Now, however, acroread leads the alphabetical list; hence, I need to use the down or up key(s) to select Evince before hitting Enter.

I'd like to rename acroread (whilst keeping it in that very list) to, say, z_acroread, so Evince would come up as the first entry again.

Answer 1

If acroread has a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications, you could simply make a back up and then sudo (or gksudo) edit that file and change the name to z_acroread or whatever. Alternatively, you could copy the .desktop file over to ~/.local/share/applications and change the name in the copied file and not in the original without the need for sudo. That way, only the specific user will see the difference.

In other words, look for a line that begins with Name=. That would be the one to change from acroread to z_acroread.

Answer 2

Perhaps a better solution is to use Nautilus Actions to create a right-click menu option in Nautilus.

Install with:

sudo apt-get install nautilus-actions

and follow the instructions given in this article on adding new functions to the context menu and/or in the answer to this question on adding a print command.

Note: That question is from 2011, so probably you should try installing from the repositories first (as indicated above).

Then you would create an option to open (or, better, print) with Evince.

Good luck.