The Canonical Panel

Documentation / Contents - File Handlers

• Overview of File Handlers
  • The Pair
  • What a File Type Is
• Opening a File
  • What Happens When You Open Something
  • Opening With a Particular Tool
• The File Handlers Panel
  • The File Type List
  • The Opens With List
  • The Detail Line
  • The Buttons
• Choosing a Handler
  • Auto-Pick Best
  • Try It
  • Opening Nothing
• Icons
  • The Available Icons List
  • Set Icon
• Creating New Files
• The Canonical Panel
• Where the Settings Live
  • The Master List
  • The Rule Files
  • The Ranking Tables
• From the Command Line
• Copyright Information

The Canonical Panel

Blueprint's default face is the EXTENDED one: the three-list panel titled "File Handlers" that this book has described. Run it with a flag for the canonical face:

cyopen-prefs               the File Handlers panel (default)
cyopen-prefs --canonical   the canonical face

The canonical window is titled "File Types and Actions", after the IRIX tool it answers to.

It Is Honestly a Placeholder

The canonical face is not finished, and it says so on screen. It draws a correctly schemed window that states plainly that it has not been reproduced from the original yet, and offers a Close button.

That is deliberate. Reproducing a canonical panel means measuring the real one: its list widths, its offsets, the exact wording of its labels. Until those measurements exist, a panel built from memory would be a guess wearing the word "canonical", and a wrong reproduction is worse than an honest placeholder.

Use the Extended Panel

Everything works in the extended panel, and it is the default, so nothing is lost by staying there. See The File Handlers Panel.

The one flag worth knowing is that cyopen itself also accepts --canonical, purely for symmetry with the rest of the desktop. It changes nothing: cyopen has no window, so there is no canonical face for it to wear.