Unifying file managers' right-click menu interfaces

[David Faure]

On Sunday 16 August 2009, Eugene Gorodinsky wrote:
> As it currently stands nautilus has one way of adding an entry to the
> right-click menu and konqueror has another (and I'm not sure about
> other file managers). I believe it would be very beneficial for
> everyone to have some standard way of accessing the menu (e.g. adding,
> modifying or deleting an entry). Thus an application could add itself
> to the file manager's context menu without worrying what filemanager
> the user is using.

Are you talking about Open With... or (what is in kde called) Actions / ...?

The first one is almost-standardized already, since it comes from the app-mime
associations (except that from what I heard gnome sorts alphabetically while
kde sorts by user preference).

The second one is indeed not standardized yet. KDE uses the previously-standardized
(and removed from the spec, but should be re-added IMHO) support for actions
defined in .desktop files.
http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Creating_Konqueror_Service_Menus
Note that even though the "format" is a former standard, the location of the files
and necessary ServiceTypes entry is not cross-platform. But I'm ok with
switching that to a different solution (different location and/or way to identify
the relevant desktop files). I think it makes a lot of sense to use the Actions=
"former-spec" though.

How do other environments do it?

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Qt Software @ Nokia to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).