A spec to set default terminal applications?

[Jan Tojnar]

For what it’s worth, there already was a quite nice Intents proposal 
[1]. Android Intents [2] might be interesting as well.

[1]: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2014-January/013068.html
[2]: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Intent

On Wed, 29 Aug, 2018 at 10:14 PM, Ian Huang <imyxhuang at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey, that's a thought. Something like an intent system sounds perfect 
> to categorize these actions. And then desktops could stop abusing the 
> MIME system or gconf or hardcoding for these things. Somebody's got 
> to bring up that we could take the easy way out and have x-intent/ be 
> a whole category of dummy MIME types, but that doesn't really fix the 
> concern about inconsistent CLI arguments, so once again I doubt it 
> would be the right choice.
> 
> So yes, I think generalizing your xdg-terminal-exec proposal into a 
> new system for intents would be great. Off the top of my head, one 
> way would be that the directories could be restructured to have 
> xdg-intents directories (instead of xdg-terminals of course) with 
> subdirectories carrying the names of the intents, like 
> ~/.local/share/xdg-intents/terminals/ for instance.
> 
> You could also structure the config .list files in the same matter. 
> But there might be a better way, it's kind of trivial how you should 
> structure this.
> 
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018, 01:21 Vladimir Kudrya <vladimir-csp at yandex.ru> 
> wrote:
>> That's an interesting area. For example, XFCE has generalizations 
>> like
>> web browser, email client facilitated by their own reinvented wheel
>> inside exo-open AFAIK.
>> I found a way to do some without any special treatment: I have a 
>> bind in
>> Openbox to open browser and mail client set up like 'xdg-open 
>> http://'.
>> But it does not work well for mailto: and there is no scheme for
>> calculators.
>> Another related function: backlight. How to generalize between
>> xbacklight or brightnessctl depending on hardware support.
>> 
>> To sum it up, this is another class of tasks, not to open something 
>> in
>> something, but to execute something. Intents? x-intent/email-client,
>> x-intent/reduce-backlight? Generalize xdg-terminal-exec into
>> xdg-intent-exec? X-ExecArg into X-ArgPrefix? What do you think?
>> 
>> On 2018-08-29 09:50, Ian Huang wrote:
>> > For example, many keyboards have a calculator function button that 
>> I
>> > believe is hard coded to use GNOME's calculator for me at the 
>> moment.
>> > Similar apps that don't necessarily handle a single type of file 
>> but
>> > reasonably call for a default choice could maybe share the same 
>> spec?
>>