Re: crufty mhn.default.sh stuff

[Paul Fox]

ralph wrote:
 > Hi David,
 > 
 > > Paul wrote:
 > > > Seems like the right swiss army knife to be using these days would
 > > > be mplayer, which appears to be available in most places, and which
 > > > has never failed to play any type of video I've given it.
 > >
 > > I like it.  How about ffplay as a fallback?
 > 
 > As George pointed out, mpv(1) is popular.  I switched to it from
 > mplayer(1).

Thanks for the tip.

 > 
 > There are so many choices; couldn't we punt to xdg-open(1) for
 > ‘mhshow-show-image’ which is the fallback if a subtype-specific entry
 > isn't found?  The current practice of pushing a GIF or JPEG through

Agreed -- xdg-open seems to do a good job, at least as a fallback.  I
just tried it on images (ImageViewer), videos (mplayer), audio (vlc),
pdf (foxit).  I don't recall configuring it, but it might have picked
up on my mplayer preference somewhere.  But they're all reasonable
choices.  (Although some of them (foxit) use stdout console as their
personal dumping ground for development logs, making command line
use...  ugly, at best.)

 > BTW, feh(1) is nice for images, and llpp(1) for PDFs.  The latter uses
 > the same fast library as the mupdf(1) viewer but has a nicer,
 > less(1)-like, UI.

As long as we're recommending:  my mh mail is delivered on a home
server, which I access via ssh.  There's a huge difference in performance
between various X11 image viewers when run in that environment.  xv
is abysmal, for instance -- it takes forever to get going.  At the
other end of the spectrum is "viewnior" (where do names come from, these
days?), which is so fast it might as well be running locally.  (I'm not
sure it's much good for anything but simple viewing, but it's great
for that.)

paul
=----------------------
paul fox, pgf@foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 26.6 degrees)