2 A RISCOS-like filer for X
7 When the filer sees a file it chooses a MIME type for it. This type determines
8 what icon is used to represent the file and what happens when you open it. Only
9 regular, non-executable files have MIME types.
11 To work out what type to give a file the Filer looks up its extension in a
12 table, which it reads on start up from MIME-types/guess in your Choices
13 directory. This file is in the same format as the gnome.mime file, although not
14 all the information in this file is used at present.
16 To decide what happens when you open the file, the Filer:
18 - Replaces the / in the MIME type with _.
19 - Looks for an item with this name in MIME-types in your choices directory.
20 If this is not found then it tries again with just the media type.
21 - Runs the application it files there, passing the pathname of the file as
24 So, double clicking on a file of type text/plain may try to run:
25 ~/Choices/MIME-types/text_plain/AppRun pathname
26 If that's not found then it will try:
27 ~/Choices/MIME-types/text/AppRun pathname
28 The idea is that you create symlinks in MIME-types to applications that you
29 want to handle files of that type.
31 To decide what icon to give a file the Filer first tries to find the application
32 which will be loaded if you double clicked the file, as above.
33 It then tries to load an icon with the type name from the application's
34 MIME-icons subdirectory. If this is missing then it tries again using just the
35 media type. If that's missing too then it'll use a default icon for that media
36 type from inside ROX-Filer itself.
38 For example: when trying to display something of type 'image/gif' the following
41 Choices/MIME-types/image_gif/MIME-icons/image_gif.xpm
42 Choices/MIME-types/image_gif/MIME-icons/image.xpm
43 ROX-Filer/MIME-icons/image.xpm
44 <built-in default icon>