On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 3:30 PM, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 12:54 AM, Rick Johnson > <rantingrickjohn...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Chris Angelico wrote: >> >>> Which is why OS/2, back in the 1990s, had *multiple* >>> associations for any given file. You could use file types >>> (sadly not MIME types - this was before MIME was the one >>> obvious standard to use) to identify *any number* of >>> programs that are likely to be used with a file, and then >>> one of them is the global default. For any specific file, >>> you can change which program is its own default, and even >>> add specific associations for that individual file. When >>> you double-click, you get the default; if you right-click >>> and choose "Open", you could pick from the associated >>> programs. A good system, and one that I still haven't seen >>> replicated in a mainstream OS. >> >> Windows has the same features. > > It does? Show me how to specify that one file - which might have the > exact same name as many similar files - should be associated with a > different program than the one its name would normally suggest. Show > me how to identify multiple file types for a given file, independently > of its filename.
AFAIK that's not currently possible in Windows -- at least not without writing a custom shell extension. Hypothetically, the shell could support something like this on NTFS drives by storing a perceived type (e.g. text, audio, image, video) and lists of ProgIDs (e.g. txtfile, mp3file, jpegfile, mpegfile) either in a file's extended attributes (EAs) or an alternate data stream. I think OS/2 used EAs to store file associations. It's too bad NT's FAT32 doesn't support EAs (unlike FAT16 on NT, which needed them for the OS/2 subsystem) or alternate data streams. So an unobtrusive, decentralized approach that works automatically with existing backup software isn't feasible with FAT32 drives. That said, I don't see this feature as being very useful compared to just using "open with" when I occasionally need to open a file with a non-default program. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
