Re: An emacs based `xdg-desktop-portal` filechooser

[Rahguzar <rahguzar@zohomail.eu>]

James Thomas <jimjoe@gmx.net> writes:

> Rahguzar wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>    During the past few weeks, I have been working on an Emacs based
>> implementation of filechooser backend of `xdg-desktop-portal`. It is
>> very rough around the edges but I have working version at
>> https://codeberg.org/rahguzar/filechooser.
>
> Thanks! This is great news for us EXWM users. My 2c below:
>
>> The choices combo boxes are not implemented. I don't what would be a
>> good interface for them (suggestions welcome) and I have in my
>> (limited) experience.
>
> Ideas: You could ask for it sequentially before or after specifying the
> file name. Or in case of choosing a file extension, you could check the
> extension in the user input and ask the user to confirm.
>

I am generally not too fond of serial prompting so I was looking for
something like a buffer which could show all the choices and the user
could then choose not to interact with it if the defaults are ok.
However since the choices seem rare in my experience (I see that I
missed some words in my sentence saying this above), I think what you
are proposing will be alright. However I am unlikely to work on it
myself anytime soon. PR on the repository implementing this are welcome.

>> In my opinion minor compared to these is the fact the filechooser
>> dialogues are not modal, i.e. you can still freely interact with the
>> window that sent the file selection request.
>
> Perhaps you could temporarily rebind 'C-x o', 'mouse-1' etc.

This is not about an Emacs window but the window for the application
which sent the request. To see this in action you can do `C-o` from a
Firefox window and by default this will show a GTK file picker dialog.
While the dialog is active, you can't interact with the Firefox window.
I don't think it is possible to achieve this from Emacs and I am not
sure behavior is even desirable.

Related to keybinding, I don't use vanilla Emacs keybindings so if you
are using this and the few bindings provided don't mesh well with the
default Emacs ones, feel free to suggest alternatives or make a PR.

Rahguzar