desktop3 0.5.4

Insallation

pip install desktop3

Usage

Launch folders, files, … etc:

import desktop
desktop.open("what/you/want/to/open")

Introduction

The desktop package provides desktop environment detection and resource opening support for a selection of common and standardised desktop environments.

Currently, in Python’s standard library, there is apparently no coherent, cross-platform way of getting the user’s environment to “open” files or resources (showing such files in browsers or editors, for example) when requested by a Python program. There is an os.startfile function which works for Windows, but no equivalent function for other desktop environments - the webbrowser module seems to employ alternative mechanisms in choosing and running external programs and presumably does not seek to provide general support for non-URL resources anyway.

Since desktop environments like KDE and GNOME provide mechanisms for running browsers and editors according to the identified type of a file or resource, just as Windows “runs” files or resources, it is appropriate to have a module which accesses these mechanisms. It is this kind of functionality that the desktop package aims to support. Note that this approach is arguably better than that employed by the webbrowser module since most desktop environments already provide mechanisms for configuring and choosing the user’s preferred programs for various activities, whereas the webbrowser module makes relatively uninformed guesses (for example, opening Firefox on a KDE desktop configured to use Konqueror as the default browser).

Some ideas for desktop detection (XFCE) and URL opening (XFCE, X11) were obtained from the xdg-utils project which seeks to implement programs performing similar functions to those found in the desktop module. The xdg-utils project can be found here:

http://portland.freedesktop.org/

Other information regarding desktop icons and menus, screensavers and MIME configuration can also be found in xdg-utils.

Contact, Copyright and Licence Information

No Web page has yet been made available for this work, but the author can be contacted at the following e-mail address:

paul@boddie.org.uk

Copyright and licence information can be found in the docs directory - see docs/COPYING.txt, docs/lgpl-3.0.txt and docs/gpl-3.0.txt for more information.

Notes

Notes on desktop application/environment support:

Changelog

• 0.5.4 (Sep 20, 2025)

  • Fix: use raw string on docstring to avoid escape sequence issues.

• 0.5.3 (Aug 19, 2019)

  • Fix: unable to detect XFCE.

• 0.5.2 (Oct 26, 2016)

  • Add docs folder into dist file.

• 0.5.1 (Oct 25, 2016)

  • Fix letter case issue in setup.py.

• 0.5.0 (Jul 2, 2016)

  • First release.

Old Changelog