Re: dired + associating external programs

[Tim X]

chandan <chandanlinster@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
>   I am using emacs 22.1.1 on ubuntu 7.10.
> I would like to know if there is any way of associating external
> programs to known file types in "dired". For example, associating 
> * audio files (ogg, mp3, ...) with xmms, 
> * office files (odt, odp, ...) with openoffice,
> * ...

There are many ways to do this. There are some packages (check the emacs
wiki at http://www.emacswiki.org) and dired-x has some facilities to
configure dired so that when you hit ! it will make a guess as to the
program you want to run on that file. There was a package posted to
g.e.sources and this group in the last week or so that implemented ways to
call external probrams, but I don't remember the name of it. 

The way I solved this was to use defadvice on view-file which looked at the
file extension of the file about to be viewed and if it was one that had a
recognised type, I would handle it in some particular way (convert to text,
render in w3m etc), otherwise, just view as normal. 

Tim


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au