xdg-desktop-portal-scriptfm

An xdg-desktop-portal portal backend that lets you open files with a custom file chooser instead of a GUI toolkit's bundled one.

Inspired by xdg-desktop-portal-termfilechooser (called from now on xdp-tfc).

Requirements

• Vala 0.56

Building

make VALAC=valac

Installing

make DESTDIR=... PREFIX=/usr LIBEXECDIR=libexec install

Note that some distributions expect LIBEXECDIR=lib (like Arch Linux).

Configuration

scriptfm is configured using environment variables. So far it only uses SFM_FILE_SCRIPT, which must be the path to the script.

For instance, you run upon starting your window manager:

SFM_FILE_SCRIPT=~/.scripts/my-file-manager scriptfm

If you want to rely on D-Bus activation, you'd want to dbus-update-activation-environment SFM_FILE_SCRIPT=xyzzy (where xyzzy is the path to your script).

Your script

Scripts receive four environment variables. They are 1 if true, empty if false:

• SFM_MULTIPLE: multiple files should be selected.
• SFM_DIRECTORY: a directory must be selected.
• SFM_SAVE: we want to save a file.
• SFM_PATH: the path to write to, suggested by the program.

Unlike xdp-tfc, xdp-sfm expects filenames to come out NUL-terminated in stdout. This is somewhat more complex to script, but (a) alows us to handle weird filenames that are nonetheless allowed (b) many terminal file managers can work with this format (it's even the default output format of lf and nnn, for instance). See contrib/lf for an example.

TODO

• Encode the additional information xdg-desktop-portal gives us (for example, the globs expected by the program).
• Support AppChooser too.