Re: new run dialog

[Frank Worsley <fworsley shaw ca>]

Hi Jonathan,

> I've been meaning to comment on your vfs patches for a while, but I
> haven't been able to find the time to go through them closely enough.

That's ok. No worries. :)

>  1) I'd like to see us drop use of gconf keys for the helper apps as
>     much as possible.  It seemed like you started in that direction, but
>     then added the component viewer.  I'm not 100% sure what that is
>     supposed to do.  Having multiple ways to configure helper
>     applications is just confusing.

You need a component viewer because if a file has no default application
but it does have a default component, then you need to pass that
information to some app that can embed the component.

The component viewer can also be used to embed components in general.
For example, instead of Nautilus embedding them within itself. That is
not really needed, but some people were talking about making a general
viewer app so I decided to add that in.

I could also just hardcode Nautilus as the component viewer, but that
seems like a bad idea. I can understand why some people would not want
to run Nautilus, so that option should remain.

>  2) I'd like to see gnome_url_show() turn completely into a wrapper for
>     a gnome_vfs.  It seems like you did a nice job there.

Yes, I've done that. It wraps gnome-vfs and fills in a GError with
sensible error messages for the gnome-vfs result codes. Makes it pretty
convenient to call if you don't want to do that yourself.

> How about "env SOME_VAR=foo my_command" as an alternative?
> </tcsh user>

That should work too. The first token in the line has to be an
executable somewhere in the path or with an absolute/relative path that
the run dialog can find. If it's not it will try to make the command
into an http url.

If the first token is just a shell keyword but not a real executable,
then you have to prefix it with "your_shell -c".

> > 2. Command completion for known executables ala nautilus location bar.
> 
> Nice.  I've been wanting this for a while.  It would also be cool to
> have it complete along the filesystem if you start the line with '~' or
> '/'.  This way typing ~/myfile.txt or /usr/bin/gnome-terminal could be
> completed.

Yeah that would be nice. I should look at the Nautilus code for that.
The problem with the run dialog is that it's hard to figure out (on the
fly) what kind of stuff the user is entering. Absolute path, relative
path, relative to home dir, http url without the http://, or a command?

> All good stuff.  A lot of this should probably go into the dialog
> independent of the state of the gnome-vfs stuff.

Most of it is independent of that. But duplicating the code from
gnome-vfs/libgnome inside the run dialog to support showing urls would
be quite the hassle.

- Frank