xdg Digest, Vol 31, Issue 10

[Marcos]

Hello!

KDE, XFCE and GNOME, for example, are window managers which contain a file manager.
Unfortunatelly, as far as I know, there is no standard way to know which is the users default file
manager. That means 
a) the user can not change his file manager without changing his window manager (not that bad)
b) no application can implement a "open folder in default file manager" function in a standar way
( complete disaster)


Mozilla, and Seamonkey, for example, in MS Windows open the folders using windows explorer. In
Linux they just open the folders using
themselves... I took a look at the xdg-open (which comes with xdg-util), and it try to detect the
window manager through an enviroment
variable and, if it fails, it looks for a web browser:

/* from xdg-open (shell script) */
detectDE()
{
    if [ x"$KDE_FULL_SESSION" = x"true" ]; then DE=kde;
    elif [ x"$GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID" != x"" ]; then DE=gnome;
    elif xprop -root _DT_SAVE_MODE | grep ' = \"xfce4\"$' >/dev/null 2>&1; then DE=xfce;
    fi
}


A much simpler way to solve this problem is to have the default file manager as the default
program to open the inode/directory (or anything like that). By doing so, opening a directory
would be as simple as opening any file, and any program would be able to use such feature, just by
using the xdg-mime library! 


What do you think about it ?

Marcos Diez