helm-dired-open

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.

Installation

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"))

Configuration

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))

Custom 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))))

Custom applications with icons

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))))

Credits

Based on Helm and dired-open.