Confused by NoDisplay

Christof Arn christof.arn at ethikprojekte.ch
Tue Jan 7 00:10:44 PST 2014


Hi - I'm new here, please help me, if I do not post well.

I like the desktop entry system very much. There is only one point, that 
drove me crazy, until i finally found that:

If I use NoDisplay=true , then this .desktop-entry isn't shown when
right clicking a file in my file browser and choosing "open with an other
application".

At
http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-latest.html
I find still the following information that conflicts with my experience:

|NoDisplay| means "this application exists, but don't display it in the
menus". This can be useful to e.g. associate this application with MIME
types, so that it gets launched from a file manager (or other apps),
without having a menu entry for it (there are tons of good reasons for
this, including e.g. the |netscape -remote|, or |kfmclient openURL| kind
of stuff).

I thought, "not display it in the menues" would mean only the standard 
application menues with the known submenues like "Settings", 
"Administration", "Graphics", "Internet", "Office" and so on - but would 
be shown when I right clicking a file in my file browser and coose "open 
with other application". But in my xfce this isn't the case. But it 
should be as the specs say.
I don't know, if KDE or Gnome does show the "NoDiplay=true"-Entries when 
right clicking in a file manager.

I found two old threads in this mailing list about the interpretation of 
NoDisplay:
- http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2004-October/003423.html
- http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2009-May/010396.html

But if I see right, those issues haven't found a clear solution yet.

I'd like to suggest to give a hint in the specs: "At the moment, some 
software doesn't show desktop entries at all, so they can't be lunched 
from a file manager."
If software behaves exactly the opposite way as given in the specs, this 
is very confusing.

Best regards,

Christof



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