Open items in designated program with double click
Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2021 4:16 pm
XnView understands or can be set to understand what external program to open things it can't open in. For example, PDFs cannot be open natively in Xnview, but if you right click there is a menu option to open with the associated program or editor. This is auto detected for at least some file types, and you have the option to manually set associations as well, so it is in general possible for XnView to open any file type via its native program.
Doing this requires right clicking on the file and selecting a program to open with each time, or receiving an error message about not being able to open if you double click. It would be nice to be able to set the normal double click behavior for a given format to be opening it with a designated program instead of needing to use the right click menu each time to do this. This would make integrating these formats into workflows much more seamless. The left click menu can still remain for cases when you need to pick a program (ie viewer vs editor), but if one is used much more than the other this would make things much more convenient. Please add an option for this.
While ghostscript is handy for those formats it supports allowing to open natively in XNview, this is not inherently preferable if XnView can easily and simply just open the native viewer/editor and it works seamlessly. If the user specifically needs to skip the native program they still have the option to use it or other tools, but simplifying the interaction to the native program may be enough for many users and avoid issues with installing and keeping up to date external tools.
(note this is different from the outstanding request for archive-as-folder support. While XnView opens these seamlessly in the archive viewer program (Winzip, winrar, 7-zip, etc.) these do not actually provide the user with the interaction they want (view the contents as images vs editing the archive contents as a file list) and so a native capability to show the content as images in folders is needed, whereas for example opening a PDF in reader does provide the exact iteration desired for most cases and so native support is less needed.)
Doing this requires right clicking on the file and selecting a program to open with each time, or receiving an error message about not being able to open if you double click. It would be nice to be able to set the normal double click behavior for a given format to be opening it with a designated program instead of needing to use the right click menu each time to do this. This would make integrating these formats into workflows much more seamless. The left click menu can still remain for cases when you need to pick a program (ie viewer vs editor), but if one is used much more than the other this would make things much more convenient. Please add an option for this.
While ghostscript is handy for those formats it supports allowing to open natively in XNview, this is not inherently preferable if XnView can easily and simply just open the native viewer/editor and it works seamlessly. If the user specifically needs to skip the native program they still have the option to use it or other tools, but simplifying the interaction to the native program may be enough for many users and avoid issues with installing and keeping up to date external tools.
(note this is different from the outstanding request for archive-as-folder support. While XnView opens these seamlessly in the archive viewer program (Winzip, winrar, 7-zip, etc.) these do not actually provide the user with the interaction they want (view the contents as images vs editing the archive contents as a file list) and so a native capability to show the content as images in folders is needed, whereas for example opening a PDF in reader does provide the exact iteration desired for most cases and so native support is less needed.)