ROX-Filer right-click Open With menu

May 18, 2018 — BarryK

I should have done this years ago. The Right-click-Easy PET created by don570 has reminded me of this. I wrote about his PET recently:

http://bkhome.org/news/201805/right-click-easy-pet.html

Up until now, woofQ has fixed entries for the right-click Open With (or Send To) menu, that may be totally inappropriate for the file being right-clicked on. For example, Geany text editor is in the menu, but that is not appropriate for, say, an image file.

So, I have written /usr/sbin/build-rox-sendto, which builds a complete mime-sensitive Open With menu in /etc/xdg/rox.sourceforge.net, by reading the .desktop files in /usr/share/applications. Note, it also erases everything in /root/.config/rox.sourceforge.net/SendTo

Now, the menu is appropriate to the type of file, for example:

Those applications are all able to open an image from the commandline. The bottom group, Bcrypt and gHasher, will appear in all cases, regardless of mime-type.

Furthermore, the menu is updated when a package is installed or removed by the PPM. The modified scripts are /usr/local/petget/installpkg.sh and removepreview.sh.

I kept thinking that we need this, amazing how procrastination can keep delaying something year after year!

I have removed don570's PET from the repository, as it will conflict.

EDIT 19 May 2018
Continuing to refine the context-sensitive right-click menu, lots of good things happening. For example, right-click on a PET package:

...as you can see, the mime-sensitive choices appear on the top-level, no need to burrow into the "Open With..." sub-menu. For PET packages, there is now the very convenient choice of "pet2dir" which is a utility to expand the PET to a folder, or "petget" to install the PET.

Tags: easy, quirky