New Jupyter Notebook instance always opens even with nbopen

Question

I have Jupyter Notebook (6.4.12) installed via pip on Rapberry Pi OS (Raspbian bullseye (11), 5.15.56). I can double-click on .ipynb files, and they start a new Notebook instance as expected.

I installed the nbopen (0.6) package via pip after installing Notebook and restarting and ran python3 -m nbopen.install_xdg, expecting that double-clicking a file will now open it in an existing Notebook instance where possible.

However, the old behavior has continued. No error messages are produced, and changing nbopen.desktop at ~/.local/share/applications/ to use nbopen %f or python3 -m nbopen %f have changed nothing.

Using nbopen <file> in terminal works as I would expect it to.

Why has this not worked, and what can I do to fix this to the expected behavior?

Answer 1

The issue arises from Jupyter Notebook's jupyter-notebook.desktop registering Notebook as the primary way to open .ipynb files. If you restart, it will remain cached as the primary way, even if you remove the appropriate line from the .desktop file.

Since both call themselves "Jupyter Notebook" when opening files, and nbopen effectively fails to Notebook's default behavior, it may be clearest to just remove Jupyter as a way to open .ipynb files:

In ~/.local/share/applications/jupyter-notebook.desktop remove the line MimeType=application/x-ipynb+json; or comment it out with #.

In ~/.local/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache, change the lineapplication/x-ipynb+json=jupyter-notebook.desktop;nbopen.desktop; to application/x-ipynb+json=nbopen.desktop;

If you do not wish to remove Jupyter Notebook as a way to open.ipynb files, you can skip removing the line in jupyter-notebook.desktop and instead reorder the two entires in mimeinfo.cache.