Re: [Nautilus-list] script w/ mime handling

[John Sullivan <sullivan spies com>]

I think Shane makes some very good points here about the similarities and
differences of Open With and Scripts.

Making "Open With" work with multiple selections would be a great thing for
someone to do. The simplest form would be to only be enabled if all selected
items are the same MIME type. This would be lame, but better than the
current behavior. It's not clear what the best design is when the selection
has mixed MIME types, especially when there's no single registered
application that can handle all of the currently selected MIME types. But
almost any solution is better than the current complete lack of solution.

The MIME types control panel is sloppy in its appearance and some behavior
details, and could definitely be cleaned up even without changing the basic
design. This too would help lower the barrier to users entering executables
into the MIME type handlers database.

John



on 10/17/01 4:10 PM, Shane Mueller at smueller umich edu wrote:

> Recently been a lot of discussion about mime-type handling for scripts
> in Nautilus.
> 
> I would like to point out that this is already possible: the Open/Open
> with... context menus are already mime-type based. I think scripts are
> great, but they are kind of kludgy if they are relied upon too
> frequently. 
> 
> My question is: why are people suggesting that Nautilus should add
> functionality for mime-aware scripts, rather than just going to the
> control center and adding their scripts to the mime-type they want?
> What is wrong with the current "Open With..." menu and mime-handling
> functionality that makes people willing to go to the Scripts menu, and
> search through a long list of irrelevant script names or wade through
> hierarchical menus?  Apparently, people feel that it is often easier to
> use the scripts menu than to use the "Open With..." menus.  There are
> several reasons why this might be so:
> 
> 1) Ease of installation. Just copy file to folder and it works.
> 
> 2) It is difficult to add/change/alter mime-type associations. Since the
> mime-type database interface is file-type based, rather than
> application-based, associating a single application with a bunch of file
> types is difficult--and this is what is wanted. This database has two
> primary dimensions (file-type and executable), but it is currently being
> viewed as a tree, parsed by file-type.  The scripts menu allows you to
> have an application that can be invoked through nautilus for ANY type of
> file, which is often easier than going in and editing many or all
> mime-types to include your application.
> 
> 3) The "Open" menu option provides a very different metaphor for
> thinking about what you can do to a file than "Scripts" does. I think
> 'Open' is more desktop-application based, while 'scripts' is more
> file-processing based.  Maybe this needs to be rethought, relabeled, or
> a more obvious way to add a script to the "Open" menu should be
> developed. I think that most people who want mime-aware scripts just
> haven't realized that a script can be made 'mime-aware' by adding it to
> the "Open With..." menu. I myself didn't until today.
> 
> 4) The "Open With" menu is disabled for multiple selections, even if
> they are the same mime-type.
> 
> 5) Nautilus provides some environment variables a script can use when it
> is is executed.
> 
> I think that enabling mime-aware scripts will destroy some of the
> advantages that people find by using the 'scripts' menu, because it
> would require installers, editors, or a lack of transparency--creating
> the same situation that lead to scripts being popular. On the other hand
> they really won't necessarily make the current scheme much more usable,
> because a 'mime-aware' scripts menu won't have the effect of
> 'presenting' the truely relevant scripts--it will only 'filter' the
> irrelevant ones.  Many (maybe most) scripts are intended for ANY
> mime-type (about 25 of 40 on my website*), so the scripts menu would
> still be full of scripts that you don't currently want to use. It is a
> little messy allowing a script to execute itself on a file it was never
> intended to be used on, but you can always make a script only accept
> certain mime types using the "file" command.
> 
> I think a better solution would be to make it easier to deal with
> mime-type handling and the 'Open With..' menu. Maybe a few changes could
> also be made to Nautilus to address issues 3-5 above, but much of the
> asked-for functionality is in place already.  Its just sometimes a
> little difficult to use.
> 
> * http://www-personal.umich.edu/~smueller/Nautilus-Scripts
> 
> Stm...
> ===================================================
> Shane Mueller                       East Hall 4424
> (734) 647-3698            Cognition and Perception
> smueller umich edu      The University of Michigan
> http://www-personal.umich.edu/~smueller
> ====================================================
> 
> 
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