"Open with..." menu getting overloaded with unwanted options.

[jstressman]

Haiku is automatically adding to the "Open with..." list any applications it finds on any of my BFS drives capable of opening the given file.

I have backups of my whole Haiku system on there, as well as folders containing work I'm doing on other applications etc. This has led to a real mess of the "Open with..." context menu.

I don't think a user should be forced to hide things from Haiku on non-BFS drives (and lose attributes), or zip things etc.

Wouldn't an option to exclude drives or something be a better option? Apparently it's supposed to be a feature that these applications are automatically added based on queries etc... but hopefully there's some better way to deal with this side effect.

[X512]

As workaround backup partition can be unmounted if not used.

[humdinger]

I'd suggest to have all apps on /boot on the first level of the context menu and hide apps on other drives under drive-folders in a second level.

"Open with" window would have to be changed in the same way.

[Disreali]

Why not just have the "Open with... context menu" be limited to the /boot volume and have the "Open with window" behave it does now. That way if there are apps not on the /boot volume the user can just click the "Open with... context menu" item or CTRL+ALT+O to list all application on all mounted volume.

[humdinger]

Context menus are just too convenient to limit the apps listed there only to /boot.
I'm not sure my suggestion with the submenus for what's on other drives is that great either. What about duplicates on the same drive, for example? Maybe this would work better:

List all apps on the first level. In case of duplicates, have those with their path (maybe as tooltips) in that entry's submenu. If a user clicks the first level entry, it defaults to the app that's on /boot

[jstressman]

I've now run into yet another really irritating side effect of this "trying to be helpful" non-helpful behavior.

I erroneously filed ticket #9504 because Haiku was opening PDF files without me installing BePDF, leading me to believe there was a bug with installoptionalpackages listing an already installed program.

I didn't realize until just after I'd filed the ticket (and did a search and only found copies on my backup drive) that Haiku was picking a random copy out of the several in my backup folders and using that instead.

[anevilyak]

(In #11024) Duplicate of #8799.

[grexe]

adding another twist: as a developer, I want to hide helper applications that have the B_BACKGROUND_APPLICATION flag set.

I think it would be a useful convention to have Tracker hide background apps automatically, since they are usually not meant to be invoked by the user directly. I still want to be able to specify supported filetypes as I need this in my application suite.