Re: Dired command for a GUI browser?

[J G Miller <miller@yoyo.ORG>]

On Thursday, March 21st, 2013, at 08:11:39h -0400, Haines Brown complained:

> I daily have to run the "! w3m" command on an .html file selected in
> dired. However these .html files are from a particular source, and their
> organization makes the w3m display very difficult to read. I am running
> Emacs under Debian Squeeze.
> 
> I would like to run a Firefox or Conkeror command on those files, but
> when I try "! firefox", Firebox starts but reports page not found. As
> best I can make out none of the emacs or dired extensions address this
> problem.

More than likely because doing the command manually done as

     firefox some_file.html

does not work if the command is launched from a directory
other than where the file is located.

Strangely enough if I used dired to navigate to a directory with an
.html file and then invoke firefox on the html file it does actually
show the html file in a new window of the browser.

Also remember that quite often the firefox binary is not called directly
but "firefox" invokes a shell script first which may set various things
before actually calling the binary which may well be located not under
bin but under lib in /usr/lib/firefox.  (All this depends on the 
GNU/Linux distribution being used.)

My suggestion would be to have a look at the web page at

<http://sachachua.COM/blog/2008/09/emacs-w3m-open-pages-in-external-browsers/>

to either invoke firefox from w3m or you will have to dig deeper into
the dired lisp to ensure that the full path to the file is passed to
firefox preferably with file:// prepended.