metashell - User Friendly Shell

[Fergal Daly]

On 27/01/2008, Forest Bond <forest at alittletooquiet.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Sun, Jan 27, 2008 at 02:01:56AM +0000, Fergal Daly wrote:
> > Seems like you could achieve much the same thing by having command
> > (let's call it "o" for open so it's nice and short) that checks the
> > mime-type of it's argument and opens it according to user preferences.
>
> This already exists.  It's called "see", "edit", etc...
>
> Honestly, a whole shell to get functionality that's been around for how long...?

Absolutely.

There is an underlying problem here, I knew that there must be a
gnome-blah to do this and I spent 5 seconds looking in the gnome-*
haystack for that needle before giving up. I also had a recollection
that there was a mime tool to do it but couldn't remember what it was.

It also seems that some people capable of writing a shell didn't know
about these (or maybe they just wanted to write a shell anyway).

So there is a problem of discoverability.

Also, gnome-open reads from my gnome-prefs, see reads from mailcap. Is
there any syncing between these? Multiple tools to do the same job is
perfectly OK but multiple places to store the same preferences is not
much fun.

"open" seems to be the obvious choice of name for such a tool but for
me, it's a symlink to openvt. Is there a good reason for openvt to be
holding this valuable name or is it just historical. The fact that
it's a symlink makes me think that someone has already tried to free
up "open". Maybe that could be completed and a discoverable,
alternatives-based "open" command could take it's place,

F


> -Forest
> --
> Forest Bond
> http://www.alittletooquiet.net
>
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