Desktop Integration

What is it?

The desktop integration allows flatimage programs to integrate themselves into the start menu, show the application icon in the file manager and also define its own mimetype.

How to Use

Configure

You can use ./app.flatimage fim-help desktop to get the following usage details:

fim-desktop:
   Configure the desktop integration
Usage:
   fim-desktop setup <json-file>
   fim-desktop enable <items...>
items:
   entry,mimetype,icon
Example:
   fim-desktop enable entry,mimetype,icon

To setup the desktop integration for a flatimage package, the first step is to create a json file with the integration data, assume we create a file named desktop.json with the following contents:

{
  "name": "MyApp",
  "icon": "./my_app.png",
  "categories": ["System","Audio"]
}

This example creates the integration data for the application MyApp, with the icon file my_app.png located in the same folder as desktop.json. The categories field is used for the desktop menu entry integration, a list of valid categories is found here. Let's assume the json file is called desktop.json and the flatimage file is called app.flatimage, the next command uses the desktop.json file to configure the desktop integration.

$ ./app.flatimage fim-desktop setup ./desktop.json

After the setup step, you can enable the integration selectively, entry refers to the desktop entry in the start menu, mimetype refers to the file type that appears in the file manager, icon is the application icon shown in the start menu and the file manager. Here's how to enable everything:

$ ./app.flatimage fim-desktop enable entry,mimetype,icon

Erase entries

To erase all desktop entries and icons created by flatimage, you can use the command:

$ find ~/.local/share -iname "*flatimage*" -exec rm -v "{}" \;

xdg-open

Flatimage redirects xdg-open commands to the host machine

Examples:

• Open a video file with the host default video player: xdg-open my-file.mkv
• Open a link with the host default browser: xdg-open www.google.com

How it Works

FlatImage installs desktop entries in $HOME/.local/share/applications, icons are installed in $HOME/.local/share/icons and mimetypes are installed in $HOME/.local/share/mime. The user must define XDG_DATA_HOME to $HOME/.local/share or XDG_DATA_DIRS to contain the path $HOME/.local/share.