[maemo-developers] file manager: file and application associations

[From: Marius Vollmer]

"ext Danny Milosavljevic" <danny_milo at yahoo.com> writes:

> Please have a look at
> <http://www.scratchpost.org/nokia-770/plotting/file-manager/> and
> reply here what you think.
>
> If possible, I'd like to hear the opinion of the maintainer of the
> file manager especially.

That would be me... :-) but the handling of file types and associated
applications is to a large extent done by other components, such as
GnomeVFS and our own mime-type machinery, which are maintained by
other people.

Anyway.

I think your proposal is right on target.

In addition to having multiple applications available to open a single
file, there is also the possibility to perform multiple operations on
a file ("View" versus "Edit", "Play right now" versus "Add to
playlist") or just giving the single operation a more descriptive name
than just "Open" ("View", "Play", ...)

Then there is the challenge of making extended meta-data work (such as
the preferred application per file) when copying files from system to
system.

> I'd implement this myself (I did, partly, for maemo's "gnome-vfs";
> but that doesn't help much), but alas, the file manager's source is
> not available.

Yes, unfortunately not.  (But if you would see it, you would try to
hide it as well. ;-)

You could try rigging your own mini file-browser by using the
HildonFileSelection widget, which is in libhildonfm2.  If you get it
to a point where it behaves like you want, I would be happy to
consider porting your changes into the real File Manager (which is
also mostly a wrapper around a HildonFileSelection widget).