Re: opening unknown file types in external applications

[Michael Goffioul]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 5:06 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:

On 04/23/2013 02:58 PM, Torsten wrote:

This one should do the job:

QDesktopServices::openUrl (
    QUrl::fromLocalFile ( const QString&  localFile )
);

OK, that works great to open files with their default applications,
but what's the best way to recognize the files that should be opened
in the Octave GUI's built-in editor?

I don't see a general way to override the default editor or disable
editing of text files so that openURL will return some kind of "sorry,
I don't know how to open that file" status so that we can handle them
internally in Octave.  So it seems that we need to recognize the files
we want to handle first, then call openURL.  But nothing that I can
think of (lists of filename patterns, binary vs. ASCII text, the Unix
file program) really seems like a complete or reliable solution.

I suppose one "integrated" way to do it could be:

1) support running octave as "octave -edit file.m": this would either connect to an existing instance of octave and open the file in that instance, or start a new octave instance

2) define a .desktop file to handle m-files

Michael.