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

[Reuben Thomas]

On 5 August 2014 00:45, Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org> 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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