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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Philip K." <philip@warpmail.net>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 07 Jul 2020 22:38:47 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > Does xdg-open invoke different programs than what we have now in
> > dired-guess-shell-alist-default?  Is there a way to know what it
> > invokes for each file type?
> >
> > I mean, you said our current database is "not modern", so that
> > probably means xdg-open invokes other programs, and I think it would
> > be good to know the differences, so we have something tangible to talk
> > about.
> 
> It will usually invoke whatever is the default on a given system, so for
> a .pdf a GNOME desktop would use Evince while KDE would open it in
> Okular. If a user changes their "preferred applications", xdg-open should
> also change it's behaviour (hence the point with "configured outside of
> Emacs" I mentioned before).

I presume the list of those candidate applications is short and known
in advance, so I thought perhaps on Posix systems where xdg-open is
not available we could try them one by one until we find one that's
installed?