A.J. Venter wrote:
I was looking at the relevant source file yesterday and I noticed that if the
location of the browser isn't specified it's found by brute force. When
running under Win-32 I've used ShellExecuteEx() which automagically associates
an http: prefix with an HTML viewer: does anybody know whether KDE etc.
exposes an API (dcom/dbus etc.) that can do this?
They all do, but none of them share it.
Gnome shares the default browser from gconf, kde you can use kfmclient
which will revert back to the configured one, every other desktop
doesn't do anything like that at all. Pretty much every file manager
not part of either gnome or KDE uses brute force or 'you have to
configure it' approach.
There was an attempt by ESR a few years ago to get a BROWSER
environment variable standardized, so all apps could simply refer to
$BROWSER and get the user's preferred default one. I have no idea why
it didn't take off, but it didn't - sad because it would have been an
ideal solution.
Perhaps the code should be expanded to check for the existence of
$BROWSER first, and THEN start brute-forcing command names ? Other
than that, it really cannot be much better than it is. Sorry.
Thanks for that, interesting. Actually I'm looking at a slightly wider problem
which is how to know what program to invoke in order to open any file: using
Win-32 ShellExecuteEx() I can pass a file name with either a known suffix
(.txt) or a known scheme (http:) and a suitable program is started, similarly
with KDE and presumably also with Gnome.
The test app that I'm recoding to "get into" Lazarus has a couple of
right-button options: one of them treats highlighted text as a file name and
opens it using another instance of the same program, the other treats it as a
command and executes it. Under Win-32 the command can have a .txt suffix which
opens whatever editor is associated, an http: scheme which opens the default
browser and so on, it would be nice to be able to duplicate this functionality
even if it was limited to desktops which conform to freedesktop.org.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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