Important
It is recommended to migrate to dired-open-with.
Right-clicking a file in most GUI file managers provides an “Open with” menu for choosing an application to be used. This package implements such functionality for Emacs default file manager Dired.
You can see it in action in this video.
The package is not available on MELPA yet, please use Quelpa (or your preferred package manager) to install.
(use-package helm-dired-open
:ensure t
:quelpa (helm-dired-open
:fetcher github
:repo "FrostyX/helm-dired-open"
:branch "main"))Or if you are a developer.
(use-package helm-dired-open
:ensure t
:quelpa (helm-dired-open
:fetcher file
:path "~/git/helm-dired-open"))The M-x helm-dired-open command works out of the box without any
additional configuration. However …
By default, the list of associated applications is searched in the
user-defined helm-dired-open-extensions variable and then in the XDG
database. The first source that returns non-nil value is used, the
rest is not evaluated. To add a custom source, disable some
predefined, or change their order, configure
helm-dired-open-functions.
(setq helm-dired-open-functions
'(helm-dired-open-configured-applications
helm-dired-open-xdg-applications))The configuration schema was inspired by and tries to resemble the
dired-open-extensions variable from dired-open (provided by
dired-hacks package). See the following example.
(setq helm-dired-open-extensions
(let ((images
'(("eog" . "Open with image viewer")
("pinta" . "Edit in pinta")
("gimp" . "Edit in GIMP")))
(video
'(("vlc --one-instance" . "Play in VLC")
("vlc --one-instance --playlist-enqueue" . "Add to VLC queue"))))
`(("png" . ,images)
("jpg" . ,images)
("mp4" . ,video)
("avi" . ,video))))One of the many options to make the list of applications a bit cooler.
(setq helm-dired-open-extensions
(let ((images
`(("eog" .
,(format "%s Open with image viewer" (fontawesome "image")))
("pinta" .
,(format "%s Edit in pinta" (fontawesome "edit")))
("gimp" .
,(format "%s Edit in GIMP" (fontawesome "edit")))))
(video
`(("vlc --one-instance" .
,(format "%s Play in VLC" (fontawesome "play")))
("vlc --one-instance --playlist-enqueue" .
,(format "%s Add to VLC queue" (fontawesome "list"))))))
`(("png" . ,images)
("jpg" . ,images)
("mp4" . ,video)
("avi" . ,video))))Based on Helm and dired-open.