Unifying file managers' right-click menu interfaces

[PCMan]

This one is good enough. I'm also thinking about how to implement this
in PCManFM, the core file manager of LXDE. However, once there are
many services installed, you'll get an over-crowded popup menu.
Besides, you cannot create a submenu to group related tasks by using
this former-spec. In addition, I think we don't only need mime type
globs like image/*, but we also need filename globs.
In addition, an extension enabling checking the content of the folder
and then generate a popup menu will be great.

For example:
When a folder contains many image files, it make sense to have an
entry for an album manager like Picasa or gthumb in the popup menu of
the folder item.
When a folder contains many ogg files, it make sense to have an entry
"Play in XXXX" for music player or something like EasyTag, which
manages music files.
When you have a folder contains .svn, you should have a submenu
contains frequently-used svn commands.
Popup menu, or context menu, should be changed according to current
context. Having different menu items for different mime-types is not
enough. For folders having quite different contents, it make sense to
provide different popup menus to the users.
This are my ideas for future file managers and I want to do it in LXDE.

If this can be standardized, then nautilus scripts and services used
by KDE can be unified.

On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 5:54 PM, David Faure<faure at kde.org> wrote:
> 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).
> _______________________________________________
> xdg mailing list
> xdg at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
>