Opening text files with emacsclient by default

Question

I want to open all text files with emacsclient. On 10.04 it used to mostly work, but on 16.04 it's completely broken:

• emacsclient exists and works fine
• it's missing from the "open with" menu
• the "add" button does nothing at all
• there are duplicates

Then I added an emacsclient.desktop entry to ~/.local/share/applications manually as found in my 10.04, but it does nothing at all.

Answer 1

You will need to add the association with text files via xdg-mime as well:

xdg-mime default emacsclient.desktop text/plain

Also, make sure you've started the Emacs server via the command M-x server-start.

Answer 2

mimeapps.list file is present in .local/share/applications open it and add text/plain=emacs.desktop in it so that all text files will open in emacs