How do you set an application as the default?

[handy]

thanks, i’ll look into that tomorrow, going to get away from computers & watch a movie now…
I’ll definitely look at that though, as pcmanfm has got some things in it that i like. i’m used to using a dual panel filemanager, so it is just how my brain is happiest to think these days.

[Begasus]

@handy

I would like to be able to double click on a video file & have it open up in my preffered player.

Works in Dolphin here.

[donn]

@humdinger

I get that people use what they know, and have been using for decades. But don’t you give up some useful features like BFS attributes, and the whole integration of queries, drill-down navigation, type-ahead filtering, Tracker add-ons… ?

I am probably missing out on most of that stuff, myself. Back in the '90s I guess I tried the Query thing out a time or two, and didn’t immediately see anything in it for me, so files have been living in UNIX world. I suspect the potential benefit depends a lot on the variety of files and application you use.

[Zenja]

Sorry for revisiting an older post.
I can see where people experience problems associating an file with an application. For files that exist on Haiku with correct attributes, then everything works, however when importing files from external file systems (non Haiku, eg. NTFS) then the attributes are not set on importing. For example, I’m experimenting with the new HEIC image translator, and cannot directly open files from NTFS volumes. Transferring the files to BeFS also wont work unless I manually open FileTypes and set the attributes. Then it always works.

What I guess most users want to see is the system use the file extensions (in this case .HEIC) to automatically fix the lack of attributes. When dragging files across, they come up as “Kind: Generic File” when they should have come across as image/HEIC. The moment you change the Kind, it works, but this isn’t automatic.

So the real question would be how to get the system to use file extensions when it encounters a “generic file”?

[donn]

What happens if you invoke Preferences FileTypes, select images> HEIC image, and add .heic in the File recognition Extensions: box?

(Assuming any of that exists - substitute real text for my guesses.)

You can go advanced here and specify a “rule” for ID from file contents, but I don’t know exactly how it works. It’s like 0.50("%PDF") for a PDF file, which obviously refers here to the first 4 bytes of the file, but I don’t know what the 0.50 part means.

[PulkoMandy]

The 0.50 is a priority in case multiple rules match the same file. This is necessary because some filetypes have very general matching rules, and we want more specific ones to override them.

Currently the format is best explained in DarkWyrm’s “programming with Haiku” book.

And, indeed, the sniffer rule would fix most of the problem here. Tracker automatically identifies files when you interact with theme or you can use the mimeset command to do it manually.