open file in directory action

[Aleksei Lissitsin]

Please also see this post
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2011-September/012060.html
and subsequent discussion on the issue.

Best,
Aleksei


On Sun, Apr 21, 2013 at 10:35 PM, Hans de Goede <hdegoede at redhat.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> Vincent, please do *not* send html mails to this mailinglist
> (or any FOSS related mailinglist for that matter), thanks!
>
>
> On 04/21/2013 08:19 PM, Vincent Gerris wrote:
>
>> Dear fellow freedesktop users,
>>
>> As a longtime Linux Desktop user (currently Ubuntu 13.04) I continuously
>> look for ways to make Linux even better on the desktop.
>> I often do that by comparing it to the commercial vendors and listening
>> to user feedback from my environment (especially from those I freed from
>> Windows :) ).
>> One of the things I came across was the way the filemanager behaves after
>> selecting a file and choosing show in folder.
>> The best example I can think of, is when a file is downloaded in Firefox
>> and the user action "Open Containing Folder" is used.
>> On Mac OS X and Windows, when this action is used, the folder is opened
>> in the file manager and the file where the action was applied on, is
>> selected.
>> In Linux (more specific Fedora 17 and Ubuntu 13.04 and probably most
>> other distro's), only the folder is shown, while the file is not selected.
>> From a user point of view, that can be very disappointing, because you
>> would have to find that file among a possible big pile of other files.
>>
>> I discussed with somebody who has quite some knowledge of the matter (and
>> a lot of other Linux matters :), Hans de Goede
>>
>
> That would be me :)
>
>
> > and together we tried some things to see if this is possible in Linux
> and if so, how.
>
>> We made an assumption: xdg-open is used to select the file. That should
>> be double checked.
>>
>
> Let me clarify this a bit, what Vincent means here, is that we assume that
> for things like
> the "Open containing folder" function in firefox' Download Manager apps
> use the desktops
> preferred applications config, looking what app to use for
> "text/directory".
>
> xdg-open, which will invoke ie gnome-open was an example I gave to Vincent
> of an app using
> the desktops preferred applications config.
>
> BTW I was a bit surprised that there is not standard for setting preferred
> applications for
> opening mime-type foo in a desktop agnostic manner. I noticed that
> exo-open and gnome-open
> seem to use the same underlying config, but I can not find any fdo
> standard for this ?
>
>
>  Looking in that direction, we found that xdg-open does not provide a way
>> to select a file in a folder.
>> While nautilus is able to do this, as are konquerer and dolphin, only
>> Thunar does not seem to have a way to do this.
>>
>> My question and partly proposal to developers would be to implement such
>> functionality.
>> For example, a command xdg-open-file-in-directory which will have similar
>> functionality as xdg-open, but with functionality that will select the file
>> that is being called upon.
>> If the filemanager used does not have such functionality, it can behave
>> as would xdg-open.
>> If I understand correctly, that would involve adding an additional mime
>> type, is that correct?
>>
>
> To clarify once more, the idea is to define a new mime type
> text/file-in-directory which
> apps can use for the functionality of opening the folder containing a file
> in the default
> file-manager. The difference with text/file would be that the associated
> action takes (a)
> path(s) to a file(s), rather then to directories.
>
> IE nautilus would advertise in its .destkop file that it can be used to
> open "files" of
> this type with a simple "nautilus %F" as action. konqueror and dolphin
> would also advertise
> this but with an Exec value of "konqueror --select %F" resp "dolphin
> --select %F".
>
> Apps which want to use the text/file-in-directory type will need to
> fallback to using
> text/directory (and passing the directory) when no default app is set for
> the type.
>
> Regards,
>
> Hans
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