[Adonthell-devel] Editors & Recent Files

[Kai Sterker]

Yesterday I implemented a recent file list for mapedit, based on the
functionality that is part of GTK+ since a couple of years now. Today
I replaced my homegrown recent file mechanism in dlgedit with the new
code.

That's fine and seems to work perfectly within the application. But
I've also noticed, that the files you edit with the two will now
appear in Gnomes global Recent Documents list. Unfortunately,
selecting them there will not open them with our tools. So that
grabbed my interest and I began to investigate a bit:

Provided we'd register a proper mime-type and an application to handle
that type, we'd be able to start our tools by clicking on a data file
or picking it from the global list. I went through the couple steps
with dlgedit and have it working locally, but I am unsure if I should
proceed. Here are the issues I see:

* In order to work, the program must be installed (in /usr/local/bin),
but our tools have quite generic names. That's one of the reasons why
I have written the build system to not install the editors. We could
prefix them with adonthell or something, maybe.
* In order to register a new mime-type, you need to be able to
uniquely identify the files. Dead simple for dlgedits .adlg files, but
what to do with mapedits .xml's? Use a different extension? Or add
some file magic?
* How will it work on other linux desktops? KDE, and the numerous smaller ones?
* Will it work on all distros or break installation? All that is
required are the two programs "update-mime-database" and
"update-desktop-database". They were already present on my Ubuntu, but
what if they are missing? Make the registration an optional step of
the build (--configure flag)? But then might as well leave it away.
Who checks for non-standard configure options when installing stuff?
* What to do on Windows or OSX? Should be working fine inside the
application still, but certainly no integration into the OS. Is it
worth the extra work, to just have this working on GNU/Linux?

Opinions welcome! I'll attach the stuff required to try it out, as I
don't want to commit before hearing some comments about all this. Just
drop everything into adonthell-tools/src/dlgedit/, then make && sudo
make install.

Kai

dlgedit.desktop
Description: application/desktop

dlgedit.xml
Description: Text Data

Makefile.am
Description: Binary data