Subject: bug#18132: Time for a smarter dired-guess-shell-alist-default? (dired-x.el)

From: Reuben Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2014 10:41:48 +0100

On 5 August 2014 00:45, Juri Linkov <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > I'm sorry if I've missed something, but I don't see what this has to do
> > with run-mailcap.
>
> run-mailcap always runs the first alternative, but with
> `mailcap-file-default-commands' you can select a command
> to run using several M-n.
>
> ...

>
> Instead of customization, a more useful UI would be to remember
> the most frequently used commands, and provide them at the top
> of the completions in the minibuffer.
>

Unfortunately, we seem to have strayed from my question, "can I replace
dired-guess-shell-* with a function that calls a suitable file-type
dispatcher (xdg-open, open, w32-shell-execute &c.)" to a discussion of
mailcap support, which is related, but perhaps better dealt with separately
(given that I'm talking about removing, not adding, functionality from
Emacs).

I was really trying to address two concerns:

1. Do other maintainers agree that it is sensible to remove Emacs's
duplicated mechanism for guessing which command to run on a given filetype,
and instead use a system mechanism (according to the underlying system)?

2. I assume that for reasons of backward compatibility it would not be
acceptable immediately to remove dired-guess-shell-*, hence my suggestion
to implement step 1 in the first instance by supplying a new default value
for dired-guess-shell-alist-default. If later this variable could be
deprecated and replaced with a simple function, so much the better.

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