Default Program | File Association

[Stanislav Brabec]

David Faure wrote:
> On Wednesday 30 January 2008, Claes H wrote:
> > Even if it is too early to standardize something like this, hopefully
> > it can be used as input to the discussion, keeping in mind for future
> > extensions... 
> Indeed.
> 
> > perhaps some day we will see edit-defaults.list and view-defaults.list?
> Well we still need a main "defaults" file (for the double-click action) so we can't split it that way.
> 
> So view/edit differenciation is more of an attribute of the mime-app association.
> Except that I can't really find a case where an app edits some mimetypes and only views
> other mimetypes,

Many programs are often able to read much more formats than they can
save. Some of them may be even read-only (e. g. bitmap editor can import
vector images). But I guess it's not exactly equal to what you was
thinking about.

There are applications, which can:

- Only View.

- Open, Edit, but cannot save as this MIME type.

- Open, Edit and Save this MIME type.

The last should be preferred for Edit

> so for now I'd suggest just making it a per-app setting, i.e.
> a new desktop file key like ActionType=edit or ActionType=view. Then filemanagers can
> split out the "edit" and the "view" associated applications into two groups.
> (I didn't name the key just "Action" because we have "Actions" already)

Something very similar (Desktop Action) is in:
http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-0.9.4.html

But it is not in version 1.0.

I can also imagine:
MimeType[edit]=text/plain

It would directly require definition (and human readable strings) for
"edit" somewhere.

> Your idea about RMB/Execute is good - but it sounds like one that would be built-into
> the file manager rather than coming from desktop files, so I'm leaving this one aside for now.
> 
-- 
Best Regards / S pozdravem,

Stanislav Brabec
software developer
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