app portgroup -- accept drag-and-dropped files from the Finder

[kencu (Ken)]

The app PortGroup might be beneficially enhanced to allow files to be drag-and-dropped on the application icon and opened in the normal mac fashion.

This Info.plist would need to be enhanced to allow the proper entries for the accepted file types.

The launch script would need to be enhanced to pass the documents to be opened to the application. -psn would need to be managed possibly, depending on the OS version.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Is there a specific program that you have in mind where this feature would actually work?

I had expected that any program wanting to support macOS to such an extent would be providing their own app bundle.

The portgroup was originally created to make it easy to wrap libSDL games, which do behave like proper Mac apps but have no need to support opening files.

[kencu (Ken)]

It may not be possible, but I think that with the proper entry in the Info.plist, if you drag and drop a file onto the app icon, it would be passed on to the shell script as an argument. Then, after screening out the -psn if needed, you would do something like this:

exec /opt/local/bin/gedit "${@}"

and gedit would open the file. Hopefully.

In an ideal world, gedit might come up as an option for opening the file when you right-or-control click on it too.

Gedit is pretty excellent -- in fact, remarkable excellent. I currently use bbedit mostly, but my current version won't work on Catalina as it's apparently somehow still i386.

[kencu (Ken)]

Ah, it's been a while since I did this.

something like this in the plist file gives Gedit the ability to respond to files dropped on it:

    <key>CFBundleDocumentTypes</key>
  	<array>
  		<dict>
  			<key>CFBundleTypeExtensions</key>
  			<array>
  				<string>*</string>
  			</array>
  			<key>CFBundleTypeIconFile</key>
  			<string></string>
  			<key>CFBundleTypeName</key>
  			<string>Text Document</string>
  			<key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
  			<string>Editor</string>
  			<key>CFBundleTypeOSTypes</key>
  			<array>
  				<string>****</string>
  			</array>
  		</dict>
  	</array>

but then I just get this when I try to drop something on the app

Jun 13 14:05:12 MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.xpc.launchd.domain.pid.gedit.2248): Failed to bootstrap path: path = /opt/local/bin/gedit, error = 2: No such file or directory

and the on-screen message is "gedit cannot open files in the "text" format.

Which is either me (probably) or GateKeeper (says the Internet ..).

[kencu (Ken)]

Maybe I should try using PlatyPus to make a few simple examples first and get it working that way. Then once it works like that, try to move it into the app PG.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Dragging a file onto an app does not cause macOS to pass that file to the app executable as a command line argument. Instead, the app must implement the ​application:openFile: and ​application:openFiles: methods of the NSApplicationDelegate class; NSApplication will call those delegate methods with information about the files. It seems beyond the scope of a portgroup to potentially implement an entire NSApplication-based wrapper for the program to provide this functionality.

[kencu (Ken)]

ok, no point then

[kencu (Ken)]

However, I think if some clever person actually wanted to implement this idea someday, py2app might actually be a scriptable general solution. <​https://py2app.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html>