Re: Updating dired-guess-shell-alist-default

[Philip K.]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> I think it doesn't make sense to duplicate the functionalities that
>> already exist in modern desktop environments, so I'd propose remapping
>> most media files to "xdg-open", if available, which should be the case
>> on GNU/Linux, *BSD and similar operating system. AFAIK macOS has "open",
>> but I don't know if windows has an equivalent for that kind of a
>> system.
>
> So you suggest to use xdg-open if it's available, and otherwise do
> what? leave the current associations intact? or something else?

That's what I wanted to discuss, if I had a concrete suggestion I would
have submitted a patch.

All in all, I think that xdg-open and similar commands are more
practical than for example xpdf, xloadimage, etc. Systems with xpdf,
xloadimage, etc. but without xdg-open are probably an extreme minority,
but nobody can say for sure -- and changes shouldn't come at their
expense.

I was thinking about improving the guessing system to support multiple
programs and check their existence. Assuming the structure of
dired-guess-shell-alist-default may be changed, it would seem like a
good compromise.

-- 
        Philip K.