As I posted elsewhere (viewtopic.php?f=309&t=173146) I am having trouble opening files from Dolphin by the usual method of left-clicking. The strange thing is that it works perfectly normally in Konqueror. When I left click on a file in Konqueror it opens in the default application for that file (as expected). In Dolphin, however, I just get a new tab inside Dolphin with the message "Folder is empty".

Everything else on my system is working normally. Furthermore, left-click in Dolphin was working normally for about 3 years (ever since I first installed KDE Neon) until the most recent system upgrade. All the other functions in Dolphin (file copying, moving, deleting, etc) are working normally.

I am puzzled that the problem is only in Dolphin, not in Konqueror. I assumed that Dolphin and Konqueror would use the same method to determine which application to open a file in, but this seems not to be the case. I would be very grateful for any information that would help me trouble shoot this issue. How exactly do these programs know which application to open a file in? Does it have anything to do with "mimeapps.list"? If so, which "mimeapps.list" (there are several in different locations on the system)?

CURRENT SYSTEM SPECS:
Operating System: KDE neon 5.23
KDE Plasma Version: 5.23.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.87.0
Qt Version: 5.15.3
Kernel Version: 5.11.0-40-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ m7-6Y75 CPU @ 1.20GHz
Memory: 7.7 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: Mesa Intel® HD Graphics 515

dcbuist wrote:Does it have anything to do with "mimeapps.list"? If so, which "mimeapps.list" (there are several in different locations on the system)?

I would say the right place to define file type to application association is here:

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kcmshell5 filetypes

What happends if you try this in console (replace path/file.ext wit the file you want to open):

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xdg-open path/file.ext

or this

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kioclient5 exec path/file.ext

Thanks!

Attempting to open a file with either

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xdg-open

or

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kioclient5 exec

gives the same result as left-clicking in Dolphin, i.e. the file does NOT open in the default application. The system seems to treat all files as if they were folders and attempts to open them in Dolphin instead (resulting in "Folder is empty").

When right-clicking on a file and selecting "File type options" under "Properties", the list of applications under "Application Preference Order" is as expected (e.g. "Kate" is listed at the top for .txt files, Okular for .pdf files, Gwenview for .png and .jpg files, etc).

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kcmclient5 filetypes

opens the graphical module for configuring file associations. I checked the settings for some of the most common file types and they all seem to be normal and match exactly the settings shown under file properties.

As previously noted, the left-click problem is not replicable in Konqueror. Why is Konqueror different?