Open Preferred Applications

This is a simple utility that opens the preferred application for a given mime type, using the thunar-vfs library. The source is available here. The usage is simple, just run open-preferred-application <mime-type>, where <mime-type> is the file type whose preferred application to open. For example to open the preferred text editor, run open-preferred-application text/plain. This tool is probably mostly interesting for creators of Linux distributions and 3rd party developers to create launchers for applications, where the actual application should not be hardcoded, but instead should be the users default application for a certain file type (and thereby for a certain task).

Generic MCS plugin

Back in 2004, James Golden and Jasper came up with the idea of providing a generic MCS sample plugin that allows to launch 3rd party configuration tools, like the NVidia settings panel, from the Xfce MCS manager. I kinda liked the idea and hacked up a sample implementation. The source is available for free here. It's very simple and straight-forward. Just modify the 4 #define's to your needs, compile and link it using the instructions given in the C file, install it to $libdir/xfce4/mcs-plugins and restart xfce-mcs-manager, Voila! The screenshot shows one possible usage for the plugin, enabling the user to run the KDE control center from xfce-mcs-manager.

Snapshot utility

This is actually one of the things that will probably never be finished. I started this because we really should provide a simple snapshot utility in Xfce, and it already does one nice thing: Take a screenshot of an abitrary rectangular region of the desktop. The other functions (grab whole desktop, grab screen n, grab monitor n) are trivial to add. So far I always failed to think of an easy and nice user interface. Maybe one day I'll finish it and put it into xfce-utils. If somebody feels like helping me out, the source is available here.