[digiKam-users] "Open With" dialog in AppImage: submenu, history, multiple image selection

[Peter Albrecht]

Hello list,

I'm testing digiKam AppImage, since it is very nice to have a recent version of
this application.

At the moment I am struggling with the "Open With" dialog. I am using digiKam
AppImage 5.9.0 on Debian Stretch with a KDE desktop.

In the past I used the "Open With" dialog to call custom shell scripts with the
currently selected set of images. For that purpose I registered those custom
shell scripts in KDE with the MIME type "image/jpeg" and in older
non-AppImage-versions of digiKam (5.3.0), those registered scripts have been
shown in the "Open With" submenu. This was very handy.
In digiKam AppImage 5.9.0, there is no "Open With" submenu. Only the context
menu entry "Open With...". This opens a dialog looking like the dialog "Open
With" -> "Other..." in digiKam 5.3.0. But this dialog does not show any
applications. See Andrey Goreev's post in September 2017:

> https://www.flickr.com/gp/goreev/U77103
> (this is how appimage's open with menu looks like on MATE desktop)

This is exactly what it looks like in KDE for me, too.

But I guess it would not be helpful to have all applications (also games and
music applications) shown in this dialog. I only miss the "Open With" submenu,
which allowed me to start those few applications registered with MIME type
"image/jpeg". But I can understand, that this might be very difficult, since
digiKam is supposed to run on many desktops, not only KDE.


Thanks to older mailinglist posts, I know, that one can enter an arbitrary
application in the first input box of this "Open With" dialog. And digiKam
remembers these.
So this is my new replacement for the old "Open With" submenu. (not that nice,
but working)

On 17 September 2017 Andrey Goreev asked, whether one can edit this list of
"remembered applications". The answer:
Those "remembered applications" are stored in the file "~/.config/digikamrc".
Look for

  [Open-with settings]
  ...
  History=command1,command2,command3

When digiKam is shutdown, you can edit this textfile with your favorite editor
and remove commands you don't want to see any more.


Someone else had the problem that selecting multiple images and clicking "Open
With" does not start (all images in one application)

   application image1 image2 image3

but does start (one application for each image)

   application image1
   application image2
   application image3

In this case, you can insert "%F" in your command line, which you type in the
"Open With" dialog. "%F" will be replaced by a list of your selected files. And
only one instance of your application will be started.

See
> https://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-latest.html#exec-variables

Example:

   /usr/bin/konsole --noclose -e echo "My selected files" %F


I hope this might help someone else working with the "Open With" dialog in digiKam.

Regards,
	Peter