Default terminal application (Re: mimeo)

[David Faure]

On Saturday 16 January 2016 19:38:46 Xyne wrote:
> Incidentally, I have not found any "standard" way to determine which terminal
> command should be used for Desktop Entries that specify "Terminal=true". If
> there is none, perhaps an environment variable such as XDG_TERM_CMD could be
> added.

Right, that doesn't appear to be standardized.

How it works right now is:

* If the application author wants a specific terminal, they can just change the Exec line
(and not use Terminal=true)

* Otherwise the implementation can choose (e.g. in the KDE implementation it's 
user-configurable and defaults to "konsole").

=> I see. If you only implement a file manager and not a desktop environment,
then you have no default/preferred terminal to pick, you would like to simply find one
that exists, preferrably one that integrates with the current desktop environment.

Rather than an env var, I would advocate a mimetype-app association for this, of course.
Much easier for distros *and* users to configure correctly across multiple desktops, using
mimeapps.list, including <desktop>-mimeapps.list.

This would probably mean a fake scheme (x-scheme-handler/terminal), actually opening the
door to some meaning in a terminal:// URL (e.g. initial directory).

It seems a bit fake (there's no terminal:// URL scheme right now), but it at least maps to
the way we solved this for "default web browser", "default mailer", etc.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
Working on KDE Frameworks 5