Mate desktop support for xdg-open (tiny patch)

The Mate desktop really lives up to its promise of a “traditional desktop”, compatible in look and feel with Gnome 2.X versions.

After running it for a few hours now, I’m sold. I never really liked Unity very much, so Mate feels like ‘home’.

There are a few minor things that need tweaking though, mostly because the desktop is no longer called ‘Gnome’. One of them is the default xdg-open script that ships with the xdg-utils package. The current version of the script assumes that the desktop is called one of ‘KDE’, ‘LXDE’, ‘gnome’ or something else. The detectDE() function fails to recognize Mate, because it tries to look for GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID in its environment, and this is obviously no longer there for Mate.

The following patch fixes that, by checking for the string 'mate' in DESKTOP_SESSION instead, and adding a tiny bit of dispatch code based on DE='mate' further down, to call a new open_mate() function.

--- xdg-open.orig	2013-03-18 12:39:07.955516232 +0100
+++ xdg-open	2013-03-18 12:38:45.955515638 +0100
@@ -308,6 +308,7 @@
     elif `dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus /org/freedesktop/DBus org.freedesktop.DBus.GetNameOwner string:org.gnome.SessionManager > /dev/null 2>&1` ; then DE=gnome;
     elif xprop -root _DT_SAVE_MODE 2> /dev/null | grep ' = \"xfce4\"$' >/dev/null 2>&1; then DE=xfce;
     elif [ x"$DESKTOP_SESSION" = x"LXDE" ]; then DE=lxde;
+    elif [ x"$DESKTOP_SESSION" = x'mate' ]; then DE=mate;
     else DE=""
     fi
 }
@@ -371,6 +372,21 @@
     fi
 }
 
+open_mate()
+{
+    if gvfs-open --help 2>/dev/null 1>&2; then
+        gvfs-open "$1"
+    else
+        mate-open "$1"
+    fi
+
+    if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
+        exit_success
+    else
+        exit_failure_operation_failed
+    fi
+}
+
 open_xfce()
 {
     exo-open "$1"
@@ -545,6 +561,10 @@
     open_gnome "$url"
     ;;
 
+    mate)
+    open_mate "$url"
+    ;;
+
     xfce)
     open_xfce "$url"
     ;;

Now this is a tiny problem, but it’s one that improves the usability of Mate for every-day stuff. One of the things that this fixes it the handling of magnet: links in Chrome. When Chrome tries to open magnet: links without this patch, it seems to “do nothing” but open a new tab and stop. With this patch applied, xdg-open works fine for magnet links (depending on your current MIME application settings too, of course), and Chrome happily opens torrent links in Mate desktops without a glitch.