Re: Epiphany : add a new search engine in user configuration

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro igalia com>]

On Mon, 2016-12-12 at 11:08 +0100, cedlemo wrote:
> in which it is said to modify the gschema xml files in /usr/share
> and 
> recompile them. I am reluctant to modify the main configuration
> files. 
> Is there another way to do this?

Hi,

The lifehacker article you found is really bad, it totally missed the
point of having a settings framework. No, you don't have to edit a data
file owned by your package manager and then recompile your settings
schemas to change the default value of a setting in order to change
that setting. :)

The Nixpanic article is correct. First, he shows how to modify the
setting for yourself. I would have added an example argument to his
'gsettings set' command, though, otherwise it's not clear that there is
supposed to be one more argument there. For example:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.Epiphany keyword-search-url "https://www.qwant.com/?q=%s&t=all";

That's all that's needed to change the setting. You can also use the
GUI tool dconf-editor to do that if you prefer.

It's also possible to change the search engine from within Epiphany
itself, but it requires some black magic: you just add a bookmark with
%s in the address, then it should show up in the search engine combo
box in the preferences dialog. But of course there's no way anybody
could ever know about that; we need a way better user interface for
that.

If you want to change the setting for all users on your computer, then
you should write a .gschema.override file and then recompile schemas as
shown by Nixpanic. That's fine, though; you're not editing any data
files owned by the package manager. If you're doing this, it's expected
that you're a system administrator and packaging your override file in
an RPM or Debian package, to avoid unpackaged files under /usr/share.

> (gconf-editor, or user configuration 
> files in ~/.config/ or in ~/.locale/share)

FYI: GNOME stopped using gconf about five years ago, we use gsettings
and dconf now.

Hope that helps,

Michael