5

Is it possible to change a setting or something in order to open files in existing Mathematica instances instead of in a new instances when double clicking the file. (This is convenient since Mathematica limits the number of instances that are allowed to open based on the license.)

Using the command line a solution was proposed in https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/a/13610/45020 however that question does not go into how to achieve the same thing in through a file explorer through double clicking / open with.

This question is similar but was considered a duplicate of the question in the first link because it didn't emphasize that it was looking for a graphical interface solution and not a command line one.

I use Ubuntu 20.04 with Nemo 4.42 as my file explorer.

Kvothe
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2 Answers2

5

I created a script MathematicaSingleInstance in /usr/local/bin that refers to /usr/local/bin/Mathematica as follows:

#!/bin/bash

Mathematica -sl "$@"

After making the file executable (see Properties/Permissions), Mathematica files can be set to be opened using MathematicaSingleInstance by default and this indeed opens all Mathematica files in the first opened instance.

Kvothe
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2

Under Gnome (I use Pop OS), I just added the -sl flag to the Exec line in /usr/share/applications/wolfram-mathematica13.desktop and it seems to work well:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Mathematica 13
Comment=Technical Computing System
TryExec=/usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/13.1/Executables/Mathematica
Exec=/usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/13.1/Executables/Mathematica -sl --name M-13.1 %F
Icon=wolfram-mathematica
StartupWMClass=M-13.1
MimeType=application/mathematica;application/x-mathematica;application/vnd.wolfram.nb;application/vnd.wolfram.cdf;application/vnd.wolfram.player;application/vnd.wolfram.mathematica.package;application/vnd.wolfram.wl;x-scheme-handler/wolfram+cloudobject;x-scheme-handler/wolframmathematica+cloudobject;

UPDATE: For some reason, this stopped working for me as described above. The solution I found is to save the .desktop file to this location instead: ~/.local/share/applications/. This is better as the file can be kept with your local user permissions making is easier to update for new Mathematica releases.

Gustavo Delfino
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