Re: dired: launch program withou stalling emacs

[suvayu ali <fatkasuvayu+linux@gmail.com>]

2009/9/11 Jonathan <jadski@googlemail.com>:
> On Jul 20, 11:05 pm, suvayu ali <fatkasuvayu+li...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2009/7/20 suvayu ali <fatkasuvayu+li...@gmail.com>:
>>
>> > 2009/7/20 Alain Muls <alain.m...@telenet.be>:
>>
>> >> I am learning to use dired for file operations. I found out how to launch a
>> >> program associated with the extension using eg
>>
>> >> (require 'dired-x)
>> >> (setq dired-guess-shell-alist-user
>> >>      '(("\\.pdf$" "evince")))
>>
>> >> The inconvenience of this is that I have to close the program before I can
>> >> resume working in emacs. Is there a possibility to launch the pdfviewer
>> >> evince and be able to work in emacs without closing the pdfviewer?
>>
>> > If you are on GNU/Linux you can try `! xdg-open RET'.
>>
>> > Alain wrote:
>>
>> > this works fine for PDF files, but it fails on .fig (xfig) or .odt (openoffice) files.
>>
>> Hi Alain,
>>
>> It should work for _all_ files. What xdg-open does is open the file in
>> the preferred application as per the settings of the user. If it fails
>> for you, then your default applications settings is not what it should
>> be.
>>
>> I am not sure how to correct this from the command line (you can try
>> xdg-mime), but from the GUI you can right click a file and set the
>> defaults by going to the properties menu on almost any modern window
>> manager.
>>
>> I believe this is getting off-topic on the emacs list beyond this
>> point. If your problem persists, try posting on your distro's user
>> list. Hope this helps.
>>
>
> My problem is not that the OO file does not open, it's that emacs
> still remains locked until the file is closed.
>
> Any suggestions on how to invoke xdg-open as a background process?
>
> Jon
>

That should not be the case. Here using xdg-open does not lock up
emacs. I think a previous post in this thread mentioned how to open an
application in the background. You could give that a try.

GL
-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.