#telescope-browser #gemini #mailcap
In praise of mailcap.
A while ago, I implemented a bastardised version of RFC1524 -- the RFC specifying how mailcap should behave (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1524)
Although it's considered old-hat these days, there's still applications which support it: (neo)mutt, imagemagik, elinks, etc.
It's a really good format for specifying mime-handling and applications to handle them, in a portable way. Originally used for mail applications, it's adoption has changed.
Timewas, /etc/mailcap was a file distriuted with many Linux distros to centralise this information.
Now, XDG has taken over -- and I can't agree it's necessarily been for the better.
Before I implemened mailcap support in #telescope, we discussed other alternatives -- and I'm glad we went with mailcap.
Why am I mentioning this?
Because recently, I had to configure a handful of applications, all of which had their own subtle and annoying way of doing the same thing.
Mailcap would have solved it for all of these applications had they used that.
