Aperi, a simple resource opener by Matteo Beniamino.
Aperi is a resource opener based on file extensions. It allows to configure the executable to launch to handle a certain extension. The project also contains a utility that launches a standard GTK 4 dialog to let the user choose an application for opening a file: the common use case it to associate this utility to all files without a more specific association.
The program should be invoked with a single argument that is a URL or a path to
open. It then reads its configuration from $HOME/.config/aperi/config and
launches the associated program, if any. If the argument of the program starts
with file:// this prefix will be automatically stripped. If the argument of
the program is a file or a directory it will be normalized to an absolute path
pointing to the file.
The configuration file is a sequence of lines. Empty lines or lines starting with (#) are ignored.
The remaining lines define the executable to use to handle file or url passed as the argument of the program and must follow this syntax:
<rule>[,<rule>]...=<executable> [<arg> ]...
<rule> can be:
- a string ending with
://. This rule matches a url starting with<rule>. For examplehttp://,https://=firefoxwill launch firefox to open urls starting withhttp://orhttps://; - the special string '/'. This rule will match if the argument is a directory;
- the special string '*'. This rule will match any argument;
- any other string
<string>. This rule will match a file ending with.<string>(that is any file with that extension).
<executable> can either be the full path to an executable, or the name of an
executable in the PATH. The executable will be launched passing all the specified
<arg>s and the aperi argument.
At the moment there is no way to pass arguments containing spaces or to not pass
the aperi argument as an extra argument to <executable>, but as a workaround
you can write a small shell script embedding the command (in real life, me,
the author, never had to write one to overcome this limitation).
Rules are checked in order. The first matching rule will be used.
The extra directory contains a sample configuration file to be copied to
~/.config/aperi/config and modified as needed;
Aperi uses the meson build framework. For a standard compilation, from the top level directory use:
meson --buildtype release build && meson compile -C build
This will create the aperi and, only if dbus development files are available,
app-chooser executables in the new directory build.
To manually compile Aperi and app-chooser you can use something like:
gcc aperi.c -o aperi
gcc app-chooser.c $(pkg-config --libs dbus-1) $(pkg-config --cflags dbus-1) -O2 -o app-chooser
Either use aperi as a standalone executable or put a link named xdg-open in
your path in a directory with higher precedence than the one containing the
system xdg-open (this will use aperi to open url and files in place of
xdg-open for example for opening files downloaded by chrome/chromium). It's
also suggested to put app-chooser in PATH and use the rule *=app-chooser at the
end of the config file to have a handy way to open all files not associated
with anything else.