Request for a file picker standard.

[Marc Boocha]

I think that there are some problems with it when trying using kio or gvfs. Maybe we should make a method for kio-gvfs-posix interlop. It could also could simplify xdg-open too.

Regards,
Marc Boocha

On 2020-01-11 20:45, Carson Black wrote:
> This is already a thing somewhat with XDG desktop portals. Both GTK+
> and Qt (and other toolkits) are able to take advantage of them, and
> you can swap out the portals being used to switch between file
> pickers, among other things.
>
> See: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal,
> https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk,
> https://github.com/KDE/xdg-desktop-portal-kde.
>
> -- Carson Black [ jan Pontaoski ]
>
> Am Sa., 11. Jan. 2020 um 10:10 Uhr schrieb Cezary Drożak <czarek at drozak.net>:
>> Hello,
>> since there is no standard for implementing a file picker in applications, each application uses a different one.
>> If the application has been written in GTK+, it will use the GTK+ file picker, if it has been written in QT it will use QT file picker.
>>
>> The problem with this approach is that they differ in look, feature set, accessibility and most importantly in the usage. It also contradicts with the UNIX philosophy of modularity. While I can replace almost every part of my operating system, I cannot do that with the file picker.
>>
>> Therefore, I am suggesting a standard for calling a default or a user chosen file picker by a standard command. For example:
>> * Show a file picker with applied filters:
>> * `xdg-filepicker --mime text/plain` or `xdg-filepicker -m text/plain`
>> * `xdg-filepicker --extension *.txt` or `xdg-filepicker -e *.txt`
>> * Allow selecting multiple files:
>> * `xdg-filepicker --multi`
>>
>> These commands would return the list of paths to the chosen files. For example:
>> ```
>> $ xdg-filepicker --multi         # File picker with multi select and no filters applied opens
>> /home/user/Documents/lorem_ipsum.txt    # After selecting the files in file picker,
>> /home/user/Documents/photo.jpg          # the command returns file list to the standard output
>> ```
>>
>> I do not know what would be the best approach for setting the file picker. I think that there could alternatively be an environmental variable like `XDG_FILE_PICKER`. There are also a few more things to consider, such as backward compatibility and extensibility. As for extensibility, emacs with GUI shows a hint at the bottom of a GTK file dialog and Libreoffice shows checkbox for opening in read-only mode and choosing file version.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Cezary Drożak
>>
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