Cleaning up "Preferred Applications" & Desktop Consistency

[Havoc Pennington]

Hi,

Couple high level points:

 - consider posting this sort of thing to fedora-desktop-list in future
 - jrb is currently redoing the MIME UI using a 
   freedesktop.org backend; don't know if this also covers 
   "preferred applications" but it probably should

On Wed, 2003-12-24 at 07:21, Warren Togami wrote:
> This means that choosing Links in the chooser as a default browser is 
> currently broken due to setting the wrong key name.  However I have yet 
> to find a program that actually honors the need-terminal key...

need_terminal is kind of a relic from the days when something like links
would appear in the desktop menus....

> I propose that we use desktop-agnostic-easy-install definitions for 
> Preferred Applications.  We should standardize on a directory named 
> something like /etc/sysconfig/preferred/browser.d within which each 
> package can easily drop definition files. 

Rather than this, we might find some way to simply use the .desktop
files the apps already install; I don't know if the fd.org mime spec
does this or not. Though I do have some misgivings about overloading
.desktop files for more than just menu entries.

> 5) This brings up the larger question of the need for desktop agnostic 
> configuration for Preferred Applications as KDE does not use gconf. 

I think the eventual goal needs to be to unify on a config system such
as gconf; dbus may enable this. We should not be too gung-ho about
creating zillions of little ad hoc systems in the meantime. However, we
may already be doing something ad hoc with MIME.

> 8) htmlview is currently flawed, and furthermore its unknown gconf key 
> behavior is broken due to the above problems with the Preferred 
> Applications chooser.
> 
> I propose that it be rewritten to use gconf's http key by default, and 
> launch logic similar to the above open-browser.sh.  I personally really 
> dislike its current attempt-to-find-any-installed-browser behavior, and 
> IMHO it should behave only in a defined and predictable manner by 
> launching only the Preferred Application.
> 
> This includes honoring the need-terminal key to launch the preferred 
> terminal if in X.  I fully support making text-mode browsers the 
> definable preferred browser in X, as some users like links since it 
> works great with the mouse and it is very fast & lightweight.
> 
> Should we have a separately definable preferred text-mode browser too? 
> I really question the value of needing to launch a text-mode browser 
> using htmlview in a non-X terminal.  I mean really... does anything 
> currently depend on that behavior, and would anyone miss it?  Let us 
> please kill that off...

htmlview should simply be deleted, as far as I'm concerned. It's a
broken stupid approach that doesn't scale to more preferred applications
than just the one.

If we need command line access to preferred apps, something more general
like "preferred-open html arg1 arg2 arg3" perhaps. In fact there may
already be a gnome-vfs-open.

> 9) After all of the above Preferred Applications mess is cleaned up, I 
> propose that we make the default panel launchers Web Browser and Mail 
> Client to launch the chosen Preferred Applications rather than 
> specifically Mozilla and Evolution.  It works great and more importantly 
> 100% predictably.

Search old bugzilla; this was already tried (web browser icon launched
htmlview) and it breaks. One of the reasons is that you don't know the
value for some of the .desktop file keys, such as StartupNotify, for
htmlview.

> 11) Evolution's clipboard behavior is currently and always has been 
> fatally broken.  Reproduce: Copy any block of text with newline 
> formatting from any Evolution window, then paste that into any other window.
> 
> Big frown!  This alone (and the fact that it takes 3-4 minutes for 
> Evolution to start with my 50+ IMAP folders) are why I switched to 
> Thunderbird.  We really need to get the clipboard behavior fixed at 
> least.  Please find existing Bugzilla reports related to this... they 
> have to exist somewhere...

This seems pretty unrelated ;-) but yes, annoying.

> 12) Mozilla, MozillaFirebird and MozillaThunderbird use ALT-A for 
> Select-All within TextAreas and TextBoxes.  This is inconsistent with 
> the default keybindings of all other end-user GUI applications in 
> Windows, MacOS and even Linux where CTRL-A acts as Select-All.  Even 
> CTRL-A works in non-Text input areas of Mozilla.  This is totally 
> inconsistent and needs to be fixed.

This sort of little thing is why I am pushing to use native widgets for
all the major apps.
 
> Windows-like behavior, and there is the option to change all keybindings 
> to be Unix-like globally (where is this setting?). 

In .gtkrc-2.0 do gtk-key-theme = emacs.

> More generally we should make it a standard that all end-user 
> applications adhere to these common keybindings.  Web browsers like 
> Mozilla *definitely* are end-user applications.  This standard of course 
> does not mandate that developer applications with a tradition of a 
> different keybinding be changed, so of course Emacs and bash continue to 
> work as they do today.
> 
> Is this sane?

It's clearly/obviously sane, but hard to do on the distribution level.
It sort of needs to be done upstream. It's much much simpler if we just
use native widgets apps.

developer.gnome.org has some big keybindings tables maintained by Calum
Benson.

Havoc