Name

xdg-settings — get various settings from the desktop environment

Synopsis

xdg-settings { get | check | set } {property} [subproperty] [value]

xdg-settings { --help | --list | --manual | --version }

Description

xdg-settings gets various settings from the desktop environment. For instance, desktop environments often provide proxy configuration and default web browser settings. Using xdg-settings these parameters can be extracted for use by applications that do not use the desktop environment's libraries (which would use the settings natively).

xdg-settings is for use inside a desktop session only. It is not recommended to use xdg-settings as root.

Options

--help
Show command synopsis.
--list
List all properties xdg-settings knows about.
--manual
Show this manual page.
--version
Show the xdg-utils version information.

Properties

When using xdg-settings to get, check or set a destkop setting, properties and possibly sub-properties are used to specify the setting to be changed.

Some properties (such as default-web-browser) fully describe the setting to be changed. Other properties (such as default-url-scheme-handler) require more information (in this case the actual scheme to set the default handler for) which must be provided in a sub-property.

Exit Codes

An exit code of 0 indicates success while a non-zero exit code indicates failure. The following failure codes can be returned:

1
Error in command line syntax.
2
One of the files passed on the command line did not exist.
3
A required tool could not be found.
4
The action failed.

See Also

xdg-mime(1), xdg-open(1), MIME applications associations specification

Examples

Get the desktop file name of the current default web browser 

        xdg-settings get default-web-browser

Check whether the default web browser is firefox.desktop, which can be false even if "get default-web-browser" says that is the current value (if only some of the underlying settings actually reflect that value) 

        xdg-settings check default-web-browser firefox.desktop

Set the default web browser to google-chrome.desktop 

        xdg-settings set default-web-browser google-chrome.desktop

Set the default mailto URL scheme handler to be evolution.desktop 

        xdg-settings set default-url-scheme-handler mailto evolution.desktop