Add Recently Used File List to Desktop Menu?

[Marc Schwartz]

On Fri, 2004-02-27 at 09:08, Jasper Huijsmans wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 08:14:35AM -0600, Marc Schwartz wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I am wondering if anyone has attempted to add the ~/.recently-used file
> > to their xfdesktop menu?
> > 
> > Reviewing the file structure of the above, it is an XML file, however in
> > a markedly different structure than menu.xml of course.
> > 
> > Presumably one might be able to parse the file, reformat it into a
> > menu.xml compatible structure and then ?insert it into menu.xml at an
> > appropriate location on the menu tree. Perhaps even using some setting
> > in the parsing script as to how many of the files would be listed (ie.
> > last 5 or last 10).
> > 
> > Any thoughts?
> > 
> 
> Interesting idea. Does it save the program the file was opened with as
> well? If not, that may make things a bit more difficult.
> 
> 	Jasper


Here is one segment from the file:

  <RecentItem>
    <URI>file:///home/marcs/.xemacs/R.el</URI>
    <Mime-Type>text/x-emacs-lisp</Mime-Type>
    <Timestamp>1077812569</Timestamp>
    <Groups>
      <Group>gedit</Group>
    </Groups>
  </RecentItem>


So, it appears that the "Group" attribute does store the application
information, however I found other circumstances (ie. .bz2 files) where
this was not the case and the "Group" was blank.

In my case, I am using Rox, so I could prefix the file path with "rox"
and use Rox's "Set File Action" MIME setting to select the proper
application. That does not help xffm users of course. 

I also just noticed another issue from the above file segment, which I
had not before. It appears that not all applications (ie. XEmacs) update
the file list. For example, if I use gedit to edit and save a file (such
as above), the recently used list is updated. However, if I used XEmacs
on a file, the list is unchanged.

That might suggest that there is a desktop (ie. GNOME/KDE) library
specific functionality when saving a file, which would be a problem. I
noted the same thing when using OpenOffice under XFCE4, whereas I am
pretty sure that when I used to run GNOME, the OO.org files were on the
GNOME panel recently used file list.

Does that make sense?  If so, then the value of my thought would be
diminished.

Marc