On Sun, 12 Jul 2020 at 08:44:39 +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > On Sat, 2020-07-11 at 18:20 +0100, Simon McVittie wrote: > > there is no generic mechanism to choose a per-user or per-desktop > > preferred terminal emulator > > This seems like something that should get added to xdg-utils?
It's something that should exist as a fd.o specification that xdg-utils, GLib, Qt/kdelibs, etc. can all implement on the client side, and xterm, gnome-terminal, Konsole and other terminal emulators can all implement on the provider side. Using xdg-utils itself for the client side should not be a requirement: libraries like GLib should be able to implement a specification directly, like they already do for .desktop files. https://gist.github.com/tmccombs/1642aacd4f6f8078ac0a718b72a65699 is a recent proposal (which I have not reviewed in detail). It's perhaps made less likely to be adopted by being more general than just terminals, which means people reviewing and implementing it would need to have enough time and attention to understand and implement the whole proposal, not just the terminal parts. https://github.com/Vladimir-csp/xdg-terminal-exec/ is an older proposal (which I have also not reviewed in detail), which does not attempt to go beyond terminals. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-specs/-/issues/54 and https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/338 are among the issues that could be resolved by desktop environments adopting one of these. fd.o operates by consensus between major desktops, rather than by some central authority requiring things, so none of this really means anything without having at least a draft implementation for at least one of the major desktop environments. smcv
