XDG Default Applications specification proposal

[Thayne]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 10:44 AM Roman Chistokhodov
<freeslave93 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't think there's a need in defining default applications if other applications have no other way to interact with them other than just launching. The opening a file/directory/uri in another app is already covered by different spec. Launching a recorder/calendar/calculator does not make much sense if the app does not pass any arguments to them and does not interact with them afterwards in some way. I can imagine an interaction with a calendar, like adding a note for some date, but this is a topic for a separate spec or defining a special d-bus interface (similar to MPRIS used by media players).
> The only thing that is really missing is the definition of default terminal emulator, needed when running .desktop files with Terminal=true property. Custom file managers just have no way to deal with this problem other than hard-coding some terminal emulator names.

Yeah, the default terminal is the main part of this I cared about. I
made it more general for default applications because in previous
discussions on this topic, there were sentiments that it should be
more general than just terminals. But even with this, terminals are
kind of a special case, since none of the other default application
categories need additional arguments passed.  Perhaps trying to make
this more general is overcopmlicating it, and we should just put the
terminal launching command in a standard place like an
XDG_TERMINAL_LAUNCHER environment variable or in a
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/terminal-launcher.sh file.