Default Program | File Association

[Tim Ringenbach]

Hi,
Is anyone working on a (shared) default program or file association 
scheme? (And other related things things like default browers, default 
email composers, and stuff like whether to open a url in a new instance, 
new window, new tab, current browser, and how to do those things?)

I'm aware of a shared MIME types thing, but not of any way of actually 
using them for anything except a 'file' replacement. (Which isn't a bad 
idea, btw.)

I tend to use the command line a lot, but I'm aware that Konquerer and 
Nautilus have ways of deciding which program to launch a file with. I 
would assume others like Rox have ways to handle this as well.

I couldn't help but notice though, that when I tried to view a .diff 
earlier, I had to specific in Mozilla Mail which program to open it in.

In X-Chat, if I right click on a link I'm presented with a list of 
browsers, and then a submenu of ways to open the url with that select 
browser. It includes things like Netscape and Opera, which I don't even 
have installed.

I'm always avoiding clicking on URLs in Gaim, because I know it won't do 
what I want.

In Gaim's file transfer dialog, there's an Open button, which is always 
disabled, since there's no way to figure out what to open it in.

Is anyone working on a solution to these problems?

If not, I might be tempted to get my hands dirty. Could anyone point me 
to the exact parts of Gnome, KDE, and other such systems, so that I 
might look at how they work? And some contact info on the people in 
charge of these subsystems would be helpful as well, especially if 
they're not on this list. Also, documentation on how it works in other 
OS's, like Windows (I used to know this, but they might have changed it 
since then..) or MacOS, would be useful to look at.

--Tim Ringenbach