[arch-general] File Associations for firefox & thunderbird :)^

[Joe(theWordy)Philbrook]

It would appear that on Jun 16, Patrick Brisbin did say:

> On 06/14/10 at 11:33pm, Michishige Kaito wrote:
> > I found thunderbird asking me for a program to execute for links.
> > Pointed it to the right program and told it to remember. Never asked
> > again. I wouldn't know where to change it if I ever wanted, but it's
> > been working so far, and I don't use a DE.
> > 
> 
> xdg-open for non-DE users is annoying but possible. I spent an evening
> reading the source (it's just a bash script anyway).
> 
> When no DE stuff is present it falls back to some application.list file
> which associates mimetypes with .desktop files. The list and .desktop
> files are searched for in /usr/share/applications globally and
> ~/.local/share/applications on a per user basis.
> 
> There's also xdg-open commands to add/remove associations and .desktop
> files to/from the list.
> 
> No match found for a mimetype and we fall back on $BROWSER.
> 
> At least that's how I remember it all working, I haven't looked in quite
> some time.
> 
> I hear you can also install mimeo or some other Xyne-tool which will
> override all this and make it work better.

Pardon me but this all sounds like a petty annoyance I have when I
want to see the content of a pdf I find on the web. I once was a kde
user and still prefer several of it's applications over the gnome
equivalents. Nowadays I'm usually working from within E17 which is by now
more of a DE than a WM (I think)... And I routinely use two different web
browsers. (Opera & Firefox) Both of which ask me which application I want
to open it with. Unfortunately it always defaults to Evince.

And I usually get better results with Okular. But unlike Michishige,
I'm unwilling to use the pop-up to set the default because I like
always having the choice. Unfortunately, for some reason when I'm
doing this with my Arch Linux installation, the "Open With" scroll
box never offers any other choices besides "Other" which won't find
"okular" but makes me enter the full pathname of "/usr/bin/okular"
and worse still, it doesn't even remember the choice if I need to open
another pdf from the same browser session. (like when I'm reviewing my
banking activity, and I want to peek at more than one canceled check image)

These files you mention in /usr/share/applications interest me. But I
don't know what to do to them to give greater preference to the desktop
files:

/usr/share/applications/kde4/okular.desktop &
/usr/share/applications/kde4/okularApplication_*.desktop

Than to:

/usr/share/applications/evince.desktop

would you be so kind as to give me a pointer or two?

I mean I don't suppose I could getaway with simply renaming
"evince.desktop" as "okular.desktop" to get that effect without
buggering up my ability to get evince on the rare occasions when I
actually want it? Or perhaps I could simply copy all the okular
desktop files from /usr/share/applications/kde4/ to
/usr/share/applications/??? 

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|  <?>   <?>       Joe (theWordy) Philbrook
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