How to associate an appimage to a file type in Ubuntu 20.04 +

Question

Was using Ubuntu 20.04 till a couple of days ago where I upgraded to 20.10 to resolve some issues.

Recently I updated from LibreOffice 6 to LO7 as I needed Digital Signature Certificates to work. This issue has been present in LO6 and previous versions for a while for many people. Now in the upgrade process I installed the LO7 appimage to test it, before wiping out my LO6 installation. Digital Signature Certificates work fine in the appimage of LO7 (but not yet on the LO7 install version -- some missing stuff that's in the appimage).

However as LO6 installation still present when I double click on an .odt or .ods file it would open LO6. So I uninstalled it. But the LO7 appimage does not start when double clicking on an Open Document Format file.

Note: I only found on this topic How do I associate a file type with an appimage? that goes back to Ubuntu 16.04 (a really nice and stable LTS). But it's a bit complicated.

Is there a simpler solution?

Cheers

xian

Answer 1

I posted the above question to share the answer I found:

Open a file browser like Caja, select the file you want to associate with a given appimage, then right-click to get the contextual menu. Choose "Open With" and then "Other Command" which will open the "Open With" window. At the bottom of this window is "> Use a custom command", click on the ">" to expand the item and a space for a command appears with a "Browse..." button to the right. Press the button, find and select the appimage and chose the "Open" button. This will return you to the "Open With" window. Make sure that the "Remember this application . . . " is selected.

In the case of LibreOffice, this operation needs to be repeated for every file type, which seems repetitive but it's simple and works.

Yes for many this might be a newbie question but when you don't know or can't find the answer . . . ;-))

Answer 2

When in Ubuntu, you can simply navigate to an odt file and right-click it. And select Properties (Ctrl+i) then Open With then Set as Default.