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afify / sfm

simple file manager
ISC License
225 stars 19 forks source link

File types and default programs #9

Closed ddkn closed 3 years ago

ddkn commented 3 years ago

Hello!

I have been playing around with sfm and it is very neat and lightweight! I was wondering on the choices on default applications. Would it be useful to not have apps choose between (or fall back to) xdg-open or some predefined apps? I am sure you have thought of this, but having a configuration file of some sort to set some defaults? Or define new filetypes that an be added to the images/arts/pdf/obj/etc... extensions. I was curious if this was in the works.

Otherwise awesome!

afify commented 3 years ago

Customization is made by creating a custom config.h and (re)compiling the source code. This keeps it fast, secure and simple (suckless style) Sure i understand your point about choosing default apps, we could change them. but i think it should be done at compile time not runtime.

ddkn commented 3 years ago

Hm, I see your point, I suppose it is a trade off of convenience. But it does limit sfm from being packaged. I suppose this is how dwm works, which is nice, but I think in the case of a file manager that can open apps that convenience has a place. Since users can have very different apps.

Would you be open to read aliases from the environment that override the config.h settings? Even adding xdg-open as a fallback could be handy. That doesn't seem like too much overhead, as there shouldn't be much difference between changing the config.h and setting a alias in function. Just one is more convenient than the other. I suppose if you are worried of a rogue agent changing someones alias to be dangerous, you have other problems on the said system.

I could be wrong, but it is nice being able to move .profiles or .*shrc files onto systems. Something in the vein of nnn

ddkn commented 3 years ago

Oh, actually something that may be simpler and keep things lightweight and more inline with the suckless philosophy would be another option like l:open but another letter (: or ! whatever vi-like key that usually is). It expects a command from the user where the active or currently highlighted file is an argument.

So if you are hovering over sfm.c and you hit <new key> the status bar turns into a $ or :! of the current users shell then you can do,

:!emacs

and sfm.c is passed to that command.

This is handy because in the case of an image file that is opened with sxiv, you can then choose to open it with gimp and edit it.

Mind you I use vis-editor, but emacs was an example, haha