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

[Philip K.]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: "Philip K." <philip@warpmail.net>
>> Date: Tue, 07 Jul 2020 10:50:31 +0200
>> 
>> I wonder if anyone else shares my point of view: while useful,
>> dired-do-shell-command seems somewhat outdated. Certain file formats
>> haven't changed much, and their handling is still ok (.patch, .tar.*,
>> .sig) but especially image, video files and documents suggest tools
>> that don't seem to be installed by default on most systems (xloadimage,
>> xpdf, ...).
>> 
>> Of course this can be mitigated by using dired-guess-shell-alist-user,
>> but I think that this shouldn't be necessary. I usually just map all
>> images, videos and documents to xdg-open, and changing the values to
>> something like this wouldn't be bad a bad idea, if you ask me
>> (especially because xdg-open doesn't block).
>> 
>> So if not xdg-open (at least on GNU/Linux and other XDG-compliant
>> systems), should the default value be changed to something that makes
>> dired-do-shell-command more useful, out of the box?
>
> Can you show a concrete proposal, like which file type would you
> suggest to handle by what command?

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.

I imagine a option like "dired-guess-fallback" with a default value
based on the system one is running would make sense from a user
perspective.

It seems like a good compromise, because xdg-open usually does what
regular users want, even if it's configured outside of Emacs, while
power-users can be expected to customise dired-guess-shell-alist-user.

-- 
        Philip K.