Unifying file managers' right-click menu interfaces

[Jannis Pohlmann]

On Mon, 17 Aug 2009 11:54:03 +0200
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?

Personally, I'd be very happy to have Desktop Actions back. Really.

In addition to that, Thunar has its own extension for custom actions. It
uses the XML format defined here:

  http://git.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/tree/plugins/thunar-uca/uca.xml.in

Actions can be defined using filename patterns and/or most popular MIME
types (e.g. text files or image files). Actions usually have a name,
description, icon and a shell command with variable support
(http://git.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/tree/plugins/thunar-uca/README).

  - Jannis
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