In praise of Gmountman

[mimosa]

Just noticed a really cool (undocumented?) feature of Gmountman: if after mounting something you press enter, it opens in Gnome Commander. There files also open on "Enter" - no doubt what they are opened with is configurable.

This is in Ratpoison. Maybe in XFCE, Gmountman is configured to call Thunar ... but I prefer GC Maybe it's possible to configure that manually, too ... or recompile Gmountman accordingly.

This is a tremendous timesaver in that a few keystrokes allow you to work with a file, play it, whatever.

[gapan]

Thanks!

Behavior is: if device is unmounted, pressing enter will mount it. If device is mounted, pressing enter will open it. In the ratpoison edition, the file manager has been set to gnome-commander. In all other cases it defaults to the file manager specified by xdg, which in turn defaults to thunar in xfce, caja in mate, pcmanfm in lxde etc... In any case it can be changed from the gmountman preferences. You could also use ncurses file managers, like midnight commander or vifm for example, by launching them in an xterm.

[mimosa]

Thanks for the explanation. Where does Gnome Commander keep its settings for which app to open what with, though? Settings/ Programs covers only a few cases; but for instance, .avi opens with Whaaam!! - which is Ratpoison's default app for the task. Are these environment variables like $BROWSER?

MC doesn't do so much of this by defaut (though it does have a cool feature that lets you see the content of a tarball). Was that why you chose gnome-commander to partner Gmountman? Also I suppose MC can't assume X is available, though in principle you could tell it to default to X apps where this makes sense, but if it is unavailable, either use an alternative (video in mplayer with ASCII output?) or fail gracefully.

[gapan]

Thanks for the explanation. Where does Gnome Commander keep its settings for which app to open what with, though? Settings/ Programs covers only a few cases; but for instance, .avi opens with Whaaam!! - which is Ratpoison's default app for the task. Are these environment variables like $BROWSER?

No. It doesn't have its own settings. It uses system MIME info.

MC doesn't do so much of this by defaut (though it does have a cool feature that lets you see the content of a tarball). Was that why you chose gnome-commander to partner Gmountman? Also I suppose MC can't assume X is available, though in principle you could tell it to default to X apps where this makes sense, but if it is unavailable, either use an alternative (video in mplayer with ASCII output?) or fail gracefully.

Of course MC does not use system MIME info.

[mimosa]

Thanks for your reply. I'll add MIME to my list of things to read up on. In Rumsfeld terms, it's now a known unknown rather than an unknown unknown