Is there a way to open the "Open with" dialog programmatically for a given file? I mean the dialog that you get when you right-click a file in Nautilus and select "Open with".
I'm preferably looking for a simple shell command to use, but an API or a DBUS interface would also work. I'm stuck with GNOME 2.28.2 on this PC, but would be also interested in a solution for recent GNOME. Maybe there is even a standardized solution for multiple Linux-ish desktops (something like xdg-open-as)?
I tried gnome-open and xdg-open, but both just use the standard association and don't let me choose the application.
I am unsure I understand your question.
If you want that a particular application appears in the "Open with" menu, then you have to register the MIME type for that application with xdg-mime, and then Nautilus will show it.
If you want a menu similar to "Open with" that opens only for specific files, then you should write a Nautilus Extension (for example, in Python or C). In the extension's code, you can check things like MIME Type, if selection is multiple, etc. Nautilus provides access to that information. See How to create nautilus C extensions
If you mean something different, then please rephrase your question :-)
I could not find a command line tool like that either, so I made one. Surprisingly it is really trivial.
https://github.com/timgott/gtk-open-with
If you want to do this programatically in Gtk, it requires only few lines of code (example using the C++ bindings):
auto dialog = Gtk::AppChooserDialog(file);
int response = dialog.run();
if (response == Gtk::RESPONSE_OK)
dialog.get_app_info()->launch(file);
Related
I know how to set a keyboard command shortcut, that's easy, I just go to Applications > Settings > Keyboard and then click the Application Shortcuts tab within my Manjaro Linux system and set whatever command to whatever shortcut.
But how can I make it run that command on a selected file or selection of files?
Is there something I can change or add to the command to make it run on the file or files currently selected within my XFCE desktop environment?
Thanks!
Your approach would require to correlate your mouse position to your desktop and file-manager. Then you would need to have knowledge of the internal state. You then would need to display some GUI. This way of thinking in regards of programing is seriously wrong.
What you are looking for are context menu actions. So keep it that way.
You have files on your desktop or in the file-manager and can call user defined actions on one or more files. I think XFCE had something like Thunar. You may use caja wit caja --no-desktop and create some actions with caja-actions-config-tool. Gnome still has it, if you prefer Nautilus.
Is there a way to use custom icons with applescript display dialog and notifications?
In the AppleScript documentation it says about the display dialog:
with icon (text | integer)
The resource name or ID of the icon to
display.
with icon (stop | note | caution) The type of icon to show.
You may specify one of the following constants:
stop (or 0): Shows a stop icon
note (or 1): Shows the application icon
caution (or 2): Shows a warning icon, badged with the application icon
with icon (alias | file) An alias or file specifier that specifies a .icns file.
So it seams like you can use your own icons, but I cannot get the following code to work.
display dialog "Text" with icon "/Users/user/Desktop/asd.icns"
It gets me the following error: "Resource not found."
The goal is to not even use a display dialog, but a display notification instead.
First of all you can't display a custom icon with display notification. The reason is that notifications are strongly related to a target application. As AppleScript scripts and applets aren't applications in terms of the Notification framework, the notification is related to the current application, the AppleScript Runner.
But you can display a custom icon with display dialog
The line
with icon (alias | file) An alias or file specifier that specifies a .icns file.
means what it says: The parameter must be an alias or file specifier rather than a POSIX or HFS string path.
Either
display dialog "Text" with icon alias ((path to desktop as text) & "asd.icns")
or
display dialog "Text" with icon file ((path to desktop as text) & "asd.icns")
path to desktop as text represents the HFS path to the desktop of the current user:
"Macintosh HD:Users:user:Desktop:"
Noted this question was three years ago, but I stumbled across this looking for a solution to a similar problem. Mine needs display alert rather than ... notification but the problem is the same because display alert doesn't have a custom icon option.
As noted in the other answer here, AppleScript has at least three interactive message type commands: display dialog, display alert, display notification, and probably others. It seems odd that only the first has the option to add a custom icon. I don't really understand why that is when it would be simple to make them consistent.
Needless to say, this question and #vadian's answer, inspired my solution - a "duh" moment for me once I realized it. It may or may not be a solution to this question. Posting it in case it is...
If the icon in question belongs to an app, you can tell that app to display the notification, regardless of whatever else your script is doing.
Your script can do whatever it needs to do to whatever other apps, or System Events, or itself (if your script is saved as its own application), or whatever else. In the middle of all of that you can have a single line that says:
tell application "MyApp" to display notification ...
The notification will have My App's icon, the result of the notification if any will be returned to the rest of the script and then your script will continue on inside whatever other tell statement or context its in.
If your icon isn't the icon for an app, then I believe there are ways to create an empty app with whatever icon you like, which can behave this way. Admittedly that's a bit of a kludge, but depending on how badly you want this, it's an option - though not one I'll expand on here.
My specific case in detail if interested (but doesn't particularly add to the solution above, just covers how I got there):
I'm writing a script that quits and re-opens another application after confirmation from the user. However, let's say I just wanted to provide a notification as per this question.
Options:
1. display dialog - has the option to provide a custom icon but lacks features of the other two options.
2. display alert - no custom icon but has other desired features, in my case the message parameter which adds extra smaller explanatory text below the primary text.
3. display notification - no custom icon but has other features as desired by this question's poster.
In my case I want alert because I want that extra message parameter (but this works for notification as well).
In my case, ideally the icon of the alert would be the icon of the app I'm restarting, but I can't tell the app itself to display the alert and then restart because the script loses connection with the app when it quits and it kills the running of the script.
If I tell System Events or the script itself to do all that then it can quit and reopen the app independently of the app, but the alert has the generic icon of itself or the System Events icon.
However, if I do what I described above - have my script do all its stuff, but have it tell the app in question to display the alert (and only that as described above), then the alert has the icon of the app in question, but the script still does its stuff independently of the app outside of that alert.
Solved my problem. May or may not solve this question.
#DavidT's answer is a perfect solution when your script is controlled by another application. However, things have changed a bit on Mac OS since.
Notably, if you run your script with tell application "MyApp" to display alert ... you will be promoting the user to give your app permissions to control itself, at least starting since Catalina. Not only this annoys the user with a new permission request, but it also looks kinda dumb since the dialogue is asking the user to allow "MyApp" to control "MyApp" and if the user denies it, your script will fail.
To avoid the permission request, just use tell me to display alert ... this will work just fine.
Another issue you might run into is that osascript may throw an exception if your script is launched as root. I found a nice workaround for that here.
This is a small example of how to launch the dialogue with the right user:
uid=determineUserIdFunction(...)
launchctl asuser $uid /usr/bin/osascript <<-EOS
tell me to display dialog "Now you see me" buttons {"OK"} default button 1 with title "WARNING!"
EOS
You have your path specification wrong. If you have a posix path to your icns file, use the POSIX file class coercion:
display dialog "Text" with icon POSIX file "/Users/user/Desktop/asd.icns"
This coerces the string path into a file reference the system understands, and works just fine.
I really want a way to switch programming contexts quickly without hunting for windows that I've left strewn about. What would be nice is a command line tool to let me switch between different patches that I might be working on, and automatically open the sublime text workspace that I had open the last time I was working on that patch. The issue is that in order for the tool to know about the workspaces associated with said patches, it either needs to be told about them explicitly, or it needs to be able to tell sublime to save the current workspace with a specific file path.
Sublime does have a save_workspace_as command, but it opens a saveAs dialog, which is not what I want, and I can't seem to find any documentation that suggests that save_workspace_as can take an argument.
Any ideas?
Long ago, I was using the hack given in http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/VimTip805 . This hack allowed me to edit any active window frame using gvim. For instance, I was able to edit my gmail replies using gvim.
Unfortunately, the hack does not work to me any more. Is there any other way to achieve the same? Or at least to achieve the same using some concrete browser (for example, firefox)?
Google Chrome
you can use GhostText with running server vim-ghost. Its not ideal, but allow to interactively use external editor (text is automatically copied to a web textarea element each return to normal mode).
Vim-ghost is written in tcl so you need install tcl.
In my case I have tcl installed but without standard library tcllib. So I found lacking packages in tcllib (tcllib/module/sha1 and tcllib/module/json) and copy them to a folder listed in tcl path (the first result of echo $tcl_pkgPath). More info: man pkg_mkIndex or here.
Of course vim-ghost server must be run (eg. in autorun script):
~/.ghost-text-server.tcl &
You can also like Vimium to navigate through web using links, tabs, j, gg and many vim-like features.
You should check vimperator( pentadactyl, which is a fork of vimperator). They offer the ability to edit text boxes, but also offers several additional functions that allow you to control firefox in a similar way to Vim.
If you prefer Vim only for edit text boxes you could try the firefox plugin "It's all text", as mentioned by Kent.
I'd recommend It's All Text plugin for Firefox.
I want to implement a simple specialized window manager for presentations (not user-controllable) that supports only the following operations:
Moving and resizing of windows
Switching desktops
Starting applications not on current desktop (in background) without disrupting current image.
I don't need any user input, button/titles, ...
What existing window manager should I use as example? There are many little "hello world" window managers, but they usually does not support desktop switching.
You don't need to reimplement the wheel.
openbox will do everything you mention and more besides.
Simply edit the rc.xml to disable the root menu, and re-launch.
Openbox also allows per app setting so that certain applications can open on a particular desktop by default, or with a particular size, or open hidden.
It also supports wildcards in the window selection, so that settings can apply to all windows.
devilspie2 is a window matching utility that can perform actions whenever a window opens.
It is highly hackable and the code is available on github. It will match windows by name/class/etc when they open, and perform actions on them. (including matching all windows and moving them to a different desktop. It will work with most window managers.
Based on the original devilspie which does not have Lua scripting, but is configured using s-exprs instead.
xdotool will also allow you to perform complex actions on windows without hacking any code. It will even fake user input (mouse/kbd) if you need it.
There are a few window managers written in Python that could be good starting points. Qtile and whimsy both describe themselves as hackable.