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Native File Associations in Maia

July 28th, 2009 by yole

In Maia, it’s finally possible to open a file in associated application (for example, .doc or .pdf) by double-clicking it in Project View or by pressing F4. This works for file types, registered under Files opened in associated applications.


The dialog displayed after you double-click a file of an unknown type also gives you options to associate its type with an application:


Also, Project View and Open File dialogs now display file type icons as they are registered in your OS, instead of generic unknown file icon.

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6 Responses to “Native File Associations in Maia”

  1. Tero Says:
    July 28th, 2009 at 9:40 am

    Hopefully this file association feature will be supported on OS X too.

  2. Stephen Friedrich Says:
    July 28th, 2009 at 10:07 am

    Great that this is finally addressed!

    However I think this implementation is flawed: There will always be file types, that I would like to sometimes open in IDEA and sometimes in the native app (png, txt, whatever).

    How can I decide whether I want to open the file in IDEA or in the native app?

    Also: Is there more integration on the way? Navigate to a file/folder in the native explorer? Open with any native application?

  3. yole Says:
    July 28th, 2009 at 1:06 pm

    Tero: The feature works under Windows, MacOS X, Gnome and KDE.

    Stephen: We’ll likely add a separate action to open any file in the associated app. Navigating to file/folder in the native explorer is already supported via Ctrl-clicking on editor tab, and we also plan to add a Select In target.

    I don’t think we’ll add a feature to open a file with any native application. You can already do a large part of it using external tools. Adding a UI for showing the list of all apps with which a file can be opened is too platform-specific and quite complicated.

  4. Charlie Hayes Says:
    July 28th, 2009 at 11:03 pm

    This looks a lot like manually assigning the application to the file type and nothing like using the actual system file type association. Am I wrong?

  5. yole Says:
    July 29th, 2009 at 5:12 am

    Charlie,

    Please take a better look. The standard IntelliJ IDEA file type assignment is of course still there, but if you choose to use the associated application, you don’t need to assign the app manually.

  6. Charlie Hayes Says:
    July 29th, 2009 at 6:26 pm

    Aha! You’re right!

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