Linux – How to register a custom protocol with xdg

firefoxgoogle-chromelinuxxdg

I've been struggling this morning trying to associate an application with a custom protocol, namely emacsclient and org-protocol.

I'm calling this protocol from a webbrowser bookmarklet, and I get the following behaviour :

In chromium,
the "Launch Application" dialog comes up, and calls xdg-open org-protocol://… which ends up firing a new chromium frame.

In firefox,
I've tried setting network.protocol-handler.app.org-protocol to an empty string or my emacsclient path, anyhow I get the following error message :
"Firefox doesn't know how to open this address, because the protocol (org-protocol) isn't associated with any program" without even showing any external application selection dialog.

I'm not using any desktop environment, so I need to make this work strictly with xdg, however, despite reading the shared mime info spec etc, I still can't fathom a working configuration.

Best Answer

The XDG method: Create an emacsclient.desktop file that handles the x-scheme-handler/org-protocol MIME type:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Emacs Client
Exec=emacsclient %u
Icon=emacs-icon
Type=Application
Terminal=false
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/org-protocol;

(Note the MimeType= line above, which is for org-protocol: URIs.)

Put the file in ~/.local/share/applications or /usr/local/share/applications.

You might have to open the file ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list and add a line like this:

x-scheme-handler/org-protocol=emacsclient.desktop

Add that under the [Default Applications] section.

Edit - expanded solution

Here's the JavaScript I use to clean the target attributes of the links (for Chrome users only) - Otherwise, the simple solution is to not specify a target attribute in the HTML in the first place.

// Get a list of all the links with external commands
var commandButtons = $("a[target='my_command']");
updateCommandButtonTargetsForChrome();

// Remove target attribute for Chrome only users
function updateCommandButtonTargetsForChrome() {
    var browserInfo = getBrowserInfo();
    if (browserInfo[0] == "Chrome")
        commandButtons.attr("target", "");
}

function getBrowserInfo() {
    var n = navigator.appName, ua = navigator.userAgent, tem;
    var m = ua.match(/(opera|chrome|safari|firefox|msie)\/?\s*(\.?\d+(\.\d+)*)/i);
    if (m && (tem = ua.match(/version\/([\.\d]+)/i)) != null) m[2] = tem[1];
    m = m ? [m[1], m[2]] : [n, navigator.appVersion, '-?'];
    return m;
}

Best Answer

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Edit - expanded solution

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