File selectors

[Duncan]

Hussam Al-Tayeb posted on Tue, 03 Nov 2015 18:18:53 +0200 as excerpted:

> On Tue, 2015-11-03 at 15:23 +0000, Bogus Zaba wrote:
>> Is there any way of forcing just one file selector to be used by all
>> applications working within the KDE Environment.
>> 
>> I am using Slackware 14.1 with KDE 14.10.5 and currently I see at least
>> three different selectors:
>> 
>>     o    One in native KDE applications (Gwenview, digikam etc)
>>     o    One in various non-KDE apps (GIMP, LibreOffice etc)
>>     o    One unique (I think) to Firefox
>> 
>> I neither love nor hate any of them but would prefer it if I got the
>> same selector every time I wanted to open or save a file.
>> 
>> I appreciate that this is a rather basic question and I believe that it
>> has been discussed previously but I have not found an answer through
>> searching in past discussion.
>> 
> Applications normally use the file dialogs from their respective
> toolkits. Gimp is a gtk+ application so it uses the gtk+ file dialog.
> Libreoffice/firefox "can" technically use kde file dialog with extra
> code on their side since they are not "real" gtk+ applications. In
> either case, it is nothing that can be done on KDE's side. That means
> firefox/libreoffice have to be modified.
> 
> Short answer: it is the application that decides what file dialog to use
> and not the desktop environment.

Same general answer here, but with a couple additional notes:

* Firefox:  There is an option, exposed by the configuration mania 
extension if you have it installed but what config mania does is simply 
provide a UI option to change options you'd otherwise have to change via 
about:config editor, so obviously it's an about:config option regardless 
of whether config mania is installed or not...

Anyway, in configuration mania, the option is UI > Other > Bottom of the 
page > Use XUL file picker even if system file picker is available.  
Looking at about:config, I think the option there is 
ui.allow_platform_file_picker.

If it's set to allow platform/system, the file picker appears to be the 
standard gtk-based picker.  If it's set to XUL/disallow-platform, it's a 
firefox-specific file picker described in mozilla-specific XUL.

What I don't know for sure, as here I'm building firefox against gtk2-
only, is whether firefox when set to use the platform picker and build 
against gtk3 (which some distros apparently do now, but it apparently 
only builds some of firefox, presumably the GUI, against gtk3, I'm told 
gtk2 is still a dep), would use the gtk3-based file picker (I'd guess so 
since it's part of the GUI), or still use the gtk2-based picker.

It may be that firefox is using the opposite gtk file picker compared to 
the other gtk-based apps, or it may be that the allow-platform option is 
turned off, so it's using the internal xul-based picker.  You could try 
toggling the option and see what the effect is...

* LibreOffice: I don't use this package here so my information on it is 
based on the reports of others, but apparently, there's code out there, 
shipped by at least one distro, that switches libreoffice to using a kde-
based dialog, despite the fact that it's normally a gtk-based app.  What 
little I know about it actually came from a thread on either this list or 
the kde-linux list, so to those interested I'd suggest looking in the 
list archives for both lists.  I did get the impression, however, that 
it's configurable, either by the kde integration being a separate 
optional package that can be installed or not, or by some configuration 
option, somewhere.  More than that I didn't really pickup, however, 
because it's kinda difficult to follow details when you don't have the 
package installed, yourself.  So the best I can offer is to suggest to 
check your distro's package listing for something like libre-office-kde, 
or as I said, to google it either in the list archives or in general 
(which may well be faster).

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

___________________________________________________
This message is from the kde mailing list.
Account management:  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde.
Archives: http://lists.kde.org/.
More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.