alt Hacker NewsShow HN: TUI for managing XDG default applications
Author here. I made this little TUI program for managing default applications on the Linux desktop.
Maybe some of you will find it useful.
Happy to answer any questions.
Comments
Thank god it’s not another React, Solid, Typescript, what have you, web abomination inside the terminal (claude code, opencode, I’m looking at you).
Bravo!
Just by reading the title, I’m sold! This should be very useful specially if you are not using a desktop environment that manages the default apps.
I always alias open to xdg-open, it’s so useful to open a file directly from the terminal.
At first I thought it was going to be some kind of solution to force all linux apps to adhere to the XDG Base Directory Specification, until I realized this related to a different specification altogether (XDG MIME Applications specification).
No one on earth has so far managed to get xdg default apps work on Linux. I've been failing since 19 years personally. If you've really succeded then congratulations!
These days I pretty much write this kind of software in ratatui with LLM when I need it. But the idea is nice. I like that. LLMs are the return of the value of the ideas guy!
But this seems human-written? Then it is interesting. Thank you for sharing.
Feature suggestion: The ability to add/remove more specific mime entries such as video/mp4
Looks neat!
Nice, but problem with all these AI coded TUI's is we will have hundreds of them, best to stick to the built in linux commands, add aliases/abbreviations (fish) if required, do you need a TUI for everything? Sometimes the answer to "Should I write this?" Is no
I usually just edit ~/.config/mimeapps.list directly.
I can see how that tool can be useful, but only if it's included in official repos. Editing mimeapps.list is simpler than the hassle of downloading and building this tool.