"open with" dialog in gnome apps (I think)

[the dsc]

If I receive a PDF attachment on thunderbird, and I want to open it with another application than the default viewer, without saving that in a specific location, there's a little trouble.

Instead of a "choose-the-application"-like dialog (like the one on Konqueror), with a fbrun-like field, what shows is a "open file" dialog, with nothing like the fbrun. What I'm supposed to do with this dialog? To search the app executable in the dephts of the Linux filesystem, and to "open" that?

Could I manage somehow (I mean, with some ease, rather than making a major rewriting of linux code or whatever) to thunderbird (and other applications in the same situation) to open the kde's "open with" dialog rather than the other one? Or at least something to type the executable, since they're all in linux's "path" (meaning that they can be executed from anywhere, just in case this isn't linux jargon).

PS.: I just guess that these different sorts of "open with" dialogs either "belong" to KDE or gnome, but I might be just mistaken and it has nothing to do with KDE or gnome specificity, but only with libraries or something else.

[ryptyde]

In Fedora with a Gnome desktop if I right click on a .pdf and the context menu opens I am given a choice to use the default "Open with Document Viewer(Evince 0.8.2)" or the "Open With>"
then have three more choices "Ghostview, KGhostview or KPDF".

[Cabhan]

Right. Firefox / Thunderbird's open with dialog is actually specific to them (and is the same on each platform), so you can't somehow change it to work like KDE's.

You can tell it what executable to use. Fortunately, virtually all of your programs are located under /usr/bin. You can run the command "which COMMAND" to tell where a specific command is located. And once you've told Firefox to use that program, it will automatically select that program in the future until you change it.

[the dsc]

Thanks. I didn't know of that "which" command, only the "whereis", which does almost the same thing.

I still wonder why the program asks the exact location of another program since usually (I think) programs can be run from everywhere... to make things worse, there's not even a field where we can type the adress, we're forced to navigate to the adress...

[Cabhan]

In the more recent Gtk file selection boxes, if you click the icon in the upper left that looks like a piece of paper, you can type in the address.

But yeah. I suppose it's an issue about trading preferences or something (each user has a different $PATH, and thus different locations where programs can be located without having to give a full path), but it is annoying to not just type the program name.