Xmonad, beagle-search, and mime types
 

Hello,

I don't consider myself a smart person. Even my mom used to say that I
wasn't so bright. But still, should this be so damn difficult?

'beagle-search' is a front end for the beagle desktop search engine.
When you issue a query, the application shows you icons (which
represent files) with the result of the query. If you click on the
icon, the file will be opened with the default application. The
problem is that I cannot set the default application by any means. For
instance I would like to open jpeg image files using geeqie.

I've failed miserably in trying to associate filetypes to
applications, using beagle search. The application beagle-search uses
xdg-open to open applications. If a filetype has no application
associated, then the default handler is firefox (don't ask me why).

So I tried to see how xdg-open works, but the man page didn't give me
any useful information. The related command, xdg-mime, doesn't work as
I expected.

I've created a file called geeqie.desktop in the directory
/home/damian/.local/share/applications with the following contents:
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Geeqie
Exec=geeqie
MimeType=image/jpeg
Icon=exec
NoDisplay=true

Then I've tried to associate geeqie with jpeg files by running:
xdg-mime default geeqie.desktop image/jpeg

The command terminates successfully, and after running
xdg-mime query default image/jpeg
I get as output "geeqie.desktop".

But xdg-open (and therefore beagle-search) still refuses to open jpeg
images with geeqie.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

Xmonad, beagle-search, and mime types
 

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 03:45:14PM +0100, Damian wrote:
> So I tried to see how xdg-open works, but the man page didn't give me
> any useful information. The related command, xdg-mime, doesn't work as
> I expected.

I asked a similar question a week or so back.

> But xdg-open (and therefore beagle-search) still refuses to open jpeg
> images with geeqie.
>
> Any ideas?

xdg-open is just a shell script. If you are interested, take a look at
less `which xdg-open`
and you will be enlightened as to why it is a complete piece of crap
unless you are using KDE, GNOME, or XFCE. (Hint, notice how nowhere in
the script does it read whatever you modified with xdg-mime.)

A possible way to work around it (depends on your application, which,
in your case, is beagle, which I am not familiar with) is to go into
the offending application that is calling xdg-open and see if you can
configure MIME types in there yourself. The application that made me
look this up, Jabref, does allow that configuration. Your mileage can
of course vary.

Cheers,

W
--
Willie W. Wong wwong@math.princeton.edu
Data aequatione quotcunque fluentes quantitae involvente fluxiones invenire
et vice versa ~~~ I. Newton