Aperi, a simple resource opener.

Description

Aperi is a resource opener based on file extensions. It allows to to launch a configurable executable to handle a certain file or uri based on its extension or schema. The project also contains a utility that launches via dbus the standard system chooser for opening a file: the common use case it to associate this utility to all files without a more specific association.

Configuration

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 and percent decoding of the remaining string will be performed. 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 the 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 example http://,https://=firefox will launch firefox to open urls starting with http:// or https://;
• 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, I, 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;

Build instructions

Meson

Aperi uses the meson build framework. For a standard compilation, from the top level directory use:

meson setup --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.

Manual compilation

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

Notice that this way of building prevents generated executables to report their version.

Installation

aperi can be used as a standalone executable to open resources from the command line. 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.

Other programs implement application associations in different ways. For a very good overview see this article in the Arch Wiki. To integrate aperi with other programs read below.

xdg-open

Put a link to aperi 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.

GIO's GAppInfo

Copy aperi.desktop from the extra directory to ~/.local/share/applications. Copy the file mimeapps.list from the extra directory in the xdg user config directory (usually ~/.config).

This file associates most known mime types with aperi.

As noted in the Wiki article, many applications still read the mimeapps.list file from the deprecated location ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list. To simplify maintenance, create a link to the deprecated location:

ln -s ~/.config/mimeapps.list ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list

Midnight Commander file manager

mc uses xdg-open by default. See above. Alternatively, if you prefer to open files in a non-blocking way, add this script in your path:

#!/bin/bash
nohup aperi "$@" &

make it executable and set the MC_XDG_OPEN env variable to the script path.

Yazi terminal file manager

Set this parameters in your yazi.toml config file:

[opener]
open = [
    { run = 'xdg-open "$@"', desc = "Open" },
]

[open]
rules = [
    { name = "*", use = "open" },
]

Author

Aperi was written by Matteo Beniamino (m.beniamino@tautologica.org).