This is already a thing somewhat with XDG desktop portals. Both GTK+ and Qt (and other toolkits) are able to take advantage of them, and you can swap out the portals being used to switch between file pickers, among other things.
See: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal, https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, https://github.com/KDE/xdg-desktop-portal-kde. -- Carson Black [ jan Pontaoski ] Am Sa., 11. Jan. 2020 um 10:10 Uhr schrieb Cezary Drożak <cza...@drozak.net>: > > Hello, > since there is no standard for implementing a file picker in applications, > each application uses a different one. > If the application has been written in GTK+, it will use the GTK+ file > picker, if it has been written in QT it will use QT file picker. > > The problem with this approach is that they differ in look, feature set, > accessibility and most importantly in the usage. It also contradicts with the > UNIX philosophy of modularity. While I can replace almost every part of my > operating system, I cannot do that with the file picker. > > Therefore, I am suggesting a standard for calling a default or a user chosen > file picker by a standard command. For example: > * Show a file picker with applied filters: > * `xdg-filepicker --mime text/plain` or `xdg-filepicker -m text/plain` > * `xdg-filepicker --extension *.txt` or `xdg-filepicker -e *.txt` > * Allow selecting multiple files: > * `xdg-filepicker --multi` > > These commands would return the list of paths to the chosen files. For > example: > ``` > $ xdg-filepicker --multi # File picker with multi select and no > filters applied opens > /home/user/Documents/lorem_ipsum.txt # After selecting the files in file > picker, > /home/user/Documents/photo.jpg # the command returns file list to > the standard output > ``` > > I do not know what would be the best approach for setting the file picker. I > think that there could alternatively be an environmental variable like > `XDG_FILE_PICKER`. There are also a few more things to consider, such as > backward compatibility and extensibility. As for extensibility, emacs with > GUI shows a hint at the bottom of a GTK file dialog and Libreoffice shows > checkbox for opening in read-only mode and choosing file version. > > Regards, > Cezary Drożak > > _______________________________________________ > xdg mailing list > xdg@lists.freedesktop.org > https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list xdg@lists.freedesktop.org https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
