Opening a project by double-clicking it: a missing habit on the desktop app

[aborruso]

This is more of a reflection than a bug report, and I have no opinion on how it should be solved — that's for you to decide. I just want to describe the friction and hear whether others feel it too.

I use GeoLibre Desktop on Windows 11 (2.8.0, installed in %LOCALAPPDATA%\GeoLibre Desktop). My projects live in a folder as *.geolibre.json files, and increasingly they are written for me by the MCP server rather than by hand. So my working loop starts in the file manager, looking at a folder of projects — and there, the one gesture I reach for out of habit does not work: I cannot double-click a project and have it open.

What I have to do instead is launch the app first, then navigate back to the file from inside it. It's a small thing, repeated many times. And it's the part that feels atypical: for a desktop application built around a document format, "the document is the entry point" is such a widespread convention that its absence is what surprises, more than any missing feature would. A project file on my disk currently looks inert — nothing about it says which application owns it, it carries no icon of its own, and acting on it means going around it rather than through it.

Two observations from my machine, only to make the report concrete and not to suggest a direction:

• Passing a project path on the command line does not open it — the app starts, but the project isn't loaded (the file never shows up in .persisted-scope, while every project I opened from the UI does).
• The installer doesn't register any file type, so the OS has no notion that these files belong to GeoLibre.

I'm also aware that the naming makes this less than trivial: .geolibre.json is a double extension, and Windows only ever looks at the last one, so at OS level these files are plain .json. That tension between a nice, self-describing filename and what the desktop can actually key on is part of what I find interesting here, and I suspect it's the reason things are the way they are.

So, the question I'd like to put to the room rather than answer myself: is opening a project straight from the file manager something GeoLibre Desktop wants to support eventually, or is the app deliberately meant to be the starting point, with files reached from within it? Either answer is fine by me — I'd just like to know which one it is, and whether other desktop users have run into the same habit hitting a wall.

[giswqs]

It has been implemented in #2163. Will be included in v2.9.0 next week.

[aborruso]

Thank you very much!