On Aug 12, 2007, at 9:30 AM, Logan Capaldo wrote:

>
>
> I think this kind of defeats the purpose of  Launchy though no?  I  
> thought
> the idea  was to use the user's preferred browser instead of "a  
> browser" w/o
> needing to config it. By making them set an env var to get the right
> browser, there's really no point in using Launchy at all. Any nix ruby
> script can easily query an env on it's lonesome, or try a list of  
> possible
> browsers, I thought (correct me if I am wrong) was that the point  
> of Launchy
> was to do the "hard part" of detecting the user's preferred browser.
>

the point of the environment var is for those cases when it cannot be  
detected or, for example, debugging launchy itself - there is no  
requirement to set it.  letting users override stuff is the unix way  
- trying to make a reasonable guess in all other cases is the realm  
of applications like launchy.  always guessing correctly is a very  
tall order: the 'preferred' browser on our sysad machines is 'lynx'  
because we do not run X, nevertheless we do use a browser for hitting  
admin panels, etc.  it's unreasonable to expect a library to run in  
such an environment.  in any case i think a reasonable algorithm, in  
order of degredation, is

   - use user provided default iff given

   - use a preferred list of browser guessers (htmlview, for example)

   - use a preferred list of browsers

   - prompt user for browser, cache answer for next time


2 cts.

a @ http://drawohara.com/
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