| Lubuntu
linux Tips |
Create a local file MIME
type Open the file you want with the App you want |
| Another
horrible monstrosity of Linux (distros) is the use of
Mime-Types. Of all the hair pulling and head banging, Mime-types is near the top of the list when it comes to having to jump through hoops in order to do something basic. Rewind back to 30 years ago. A simple beautiful idea of the ancient DOS file system that has survived the tides of time is the notion of a postfixed 'extension'. i.e the 3 character code stuck after the 'dot' at the end of a filename e.g sample.doc. Modern OSs let you extend this 'file-type' to more than 3 chars, but this is beside the point. This was and still is a simple solution to giving a file a 'type'. And then somebody had the terrible idea of using internet MIME types for local files. I guess this is fine if each file's type can be detected with 100% accuracy. But it can't. (whereareas the 3 char system CAN). Even worse, to revert back to the solution of using the 'extension' can be a nightmare to implement if your OS is infested with MIME. So here is one relatively painless way to do it using the brilliant SpaceFM file manager, ( also compatible with PCmanFM) SpaceFM has a built-in function to generate the xml file needed to create a new mime-type. The following example is to open a config file for an app called Geany. The file is plain text, but we don't want to open it with the default editor (e.g Leafpad). We want to open all ".geany" files with Geany. And leave all other text files to be opened with Leafpad. To Apply Locally 1. First, modify the app's desktop
entry..
file:
~/.local/share/applications/geany.desktop
entry: MimeType=text/geany;text/plain; .. .. ... etc 2. Make sure geany is associated with text files. e.g right-click sample.geany > Open
>
should show 'Geany' under Open. If not, click Choose, and choose Geany, and set it as Default. 3. Generate mime file: with SpaceFM, right-click sample.geany > Open >
right-click on the 'Geany' >
text-plain.xml(*new)
This creates
~/.local/share/mime/packages/text-plain.xml
Rename it to file: ~/.local/share/mime/packages/text-geany.xml 4. Edit the generated mime file, change <mime-type
type='text/geany'>
delete all unneccessary file types but do include <glob pattern="*.geany"/> save the file. 5. Update the mime cache > update-mime-database
~/.local/share/mime
6. close all instances of SpaceFM and restart it. To Apply for All users file:
/usr/share/applications/geany.desktop
entry: MimeType=text/geany;text/plain; .. .. ... etc generate, rename and edit the xml as above (as per local) and copy the local file from ~/.local/share/mime/packages/text-geany.xml to file: /usr/share/mime/packages/text-geany.xml and update the mime cache command: update-mime-database /usr/share/mime close all instances of SpaceFM and restart it. |
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