Opening files with flatpak apps through ranger

Basically ranger is a terminal program.

So anyway to launch those flatpak apps has to be terminal friendly.

There are two ways to launch flatpak apps in my knowledge.

flatpak run org.gimp.GIMP

This showed how to run GIMP
The other is to run .desktop files under /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications

Here we are going to show how to utilize those .desktop files.

Cause those .desktop's are already setup correctly to open files using flatpak's command-line interface.

For this we need to use a resource opener.

There are several ways of doing this.

We will show two of them.

The programs we are going to use are:

The reason is that these two serve different but special cases.

Using gtk-launch :

gtk-launch works as follows:

gtk-launch file.name.desktop big_buck_bunny.mkv

Following is an example using smplayer.

gtk-launch info.smplayer.SMPlayer.desktop big_buck_bunny.mkv

So one would add to their rifle.conf:

mime ^video|audio, X, flag f = gtk-launch info.smplayer.SMPlayer.desktop "$@"

The other way to do this is:

xdg-open target_file.mp4

For this one would add to their rifle.conf:

label open, has xdg-open = xdg-open "$@"

Note: this option is already added to rifle.conf

Notice that xdg-open do not ask which .desktop file the user want to use.

It simply uses the default opener for that file.

Whereas gtk-launch needs the .desktop's name to be used for opening the file.

One place where gtk-launch may be preferable is when one wants to retain

xdg-open entry yet open a file using a .desktop and ensure that a

specific application is used every time, even if someone changes default application

for that file type.

Such an arrangement is shown below :

owLD

Note: Default application associations of xdg-open for different filetypes,

can be changed using xdg-mime.

But that is out of the scope of this guide.