There's a lot of tutorials on how to change the default text editor in Unity and Gnome. There's none for Xubuntu/XFCE.

How do I change all mousepad's associations to sublime text?

I know I could install Unity Tweak Tool, but that loads a lot of dependencies, including compiz. I don't want that.

I know I can right click a file and do "Open with". There's a lot of file types I am willing to change (ruby, php, html, css, js, coffee,...), so that's not the way either.

update-alternatives is not the way either:

There are 4 choices for the alternative editor (providing /usr/bin/editor).



  Selection    Path               Priority   Status

------------------------------------------------------------

* 0            /usr/bin/vim.gtk    50        auto mode

  1            /bin/ed            -100       manual mode

  2            /bin/nano           40        manual mode

  3            /usr/bin/vim.gtk    50        manual mode

  4            /usr/bin/vim.tiny   10        manual mode



Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number: