GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 641948
Shipped .desktop file does not allow for opening files
Last modified: 2011-12-09 20:19:25 UTC
Meld's shipped .desktop file does not specify supported mimetypes or a method for launching with uris/files. Adding this is relatively easily, however meld would need to handle the case of only a single uri/file being passed to it at launch. Fixing this would provide a better user experience in GNOME Shell which will support dropping files onto launchers.
Meld doesn't currently support URI arguments, though it wouldn't be difficult to add. We do support a single file/directory being passed, though it's interpreted to mean that the passed file/directory is under version control, and we start a VC comparison of that file/directory. I'm not sure what else we'd do... We could add support for certain mimetypes to the launcher, but it does seem misleading to do so, as we don't strictly speaking support viewing "text files" or whatever. What is the benefit to adding mimetypes to the desktop file?
As said by JasSmith it will allow using drag and drop to the Launcher in GNOME Shell and Unity.
Created attachment 203034 [details] [review] Patch Not sure whether this is sufficient. In my testing, adding the single %F parameter allows me to drag n' drop files onto the launcher with ~the expected effect. I'd appreciate it if someone else could test this (either by applying the patch, and installing the result, or by manually making the change to your installed meld.desktop file) and report back. This doesn't offer to open individual mime-types, because as far as I'm concerned, that would be misleading. We need a nautilus extension for that, like the one linked from https://live.gnome.org/Meld
It seems that Unity needs MIME. It worked only with both MIME and %F.
I've pushed the change to HEAD. Gnome Shell won't actually work anyway, since it doesn't yet have support for dropping files onto dock launchers; hopefully this change will make us Just Work when that support is added. As far as Unity is concerned, that's a change that easily can (and should) be patched by Ubuntu; I'm not going to add misleading mimetypes to make Unity work, sorry. Thanks for your bug report.