.info ... was it so much a good idea?

[sim085]

Something that personally annoys me in Workbench is that it requires .info file to display an icon and determine which program to use to open a target file. I always found the Windows way of doing more natural; that is that file extensions are used to determine the type of file.

However I am really intrested to know what others thing about it and if anyone favours the use of .info files over the use of file extentions.

[sim085]

Seriously, all the people who think Windows does everything so much better should just stick to Windows, and not whine about doing AmigaOS more like Windows - or you could just use Linux - KDE and Gnome are both busy doing everything as similar as Windows as they can :p

I do not wish AmigaOS to be more like Windows and by this thread I am not suggesting or implying that .info files should be removed. I just know too little on these files and since I come from a different streem (i.e. - was very young when I last used Amiga and only did so for gaming and after that only used Windows) I thought of asking this question to see what others think about the subject ... and ofcourse to learn why these files may be important.

Your reply helped me to understand that more then one .info file can be sued with the same file to open it in different ways.

[sim085]

For example one of the problems I have is that I found several files from the old hard disk (i.e. - more then 15years have passed since the last time I used these files or my brother did). These files do not have any .info file and therefore I have no idea whit what program I can open these files. I do not know if these files are images or some save files from some game!

[sim085]

You should install deficons which automatically gives an icon (if not one already) for known filetypes.

Thanks for the info I will definitly do that.

[sim085]

But, if you do like filename-based program association, you can configure Deficons to work that way. Can't go wrong with the Amiga's configurability.

How do you do that? because I cannot understand how from the .guide that comes with DefIcon. It would be helpfull for me if I could somewhere define a rule that all .jpg or .guide are always opened with some specific tool!

[sim085]

I think DefIcons comes pre-configured for most common filetypes, such as JPEG.

Are you referring to this DefIcon?

http://aminet.net/package/util/cdity/DefIcon

[sim085]

Hmmm... I was actually thinking of the one that came with OS 3.9 - I was sure that was available separately for 3.0 users, but it's a different tool to the one you linked to...

I thought so! Does anyone know from where I can find the tool everyone seems to be referring to?

[sim085]

NewIcons http://main.aminet.net/pub/aminet/util/wb/NewIcons46.lha has built-in deficons functionality if you don't use OS 3.5/3.9. But not so recommended for basic system as it uses some resources. I used it years before upgraded to 3.5/3.9.

So there isn't a version where you can actually determine which icon to associate with which file?

[sim085]

Go to Prefs/DefIcons.

The problem is that I do not have DefIcons under Prefs and nor do I know from where to download it.

[sim085]

Tools vs Project icons ... How did this work?

Hi again,

This thread has been very helpfull to me to understand better how .info files work. After reading the many comments I tried several experiments. I mostly concentrated on using .info files as shortcuts (which I thought was something missing in Workbench3.1).

In WBStartup I have some commodities. Before what I did was copy and paste these commodities to the WBStartup directory from the SYS:Tools/Commodities directory. Yesterday I deleted the commodity from the WBStartup (still have backup in Commodities directory). I then created a new icon of type project and changed the default tool to point to the ClickToFront in SYS:Tools/Commodities. This worked fine. I felt that like this I managed to create a shortcut.

However then I tried something else ...

I deleted the .info file from WBStartup and then using DirectoryOpus I copied the .info file of ClickToFront to WBStartup. This icon was of type tool. To my surprise this still worked fine!! In other words now in WBStartup I only have .info files and do not need to copy the associated files as well, these are still in SYS:Tools/Commodities.

So does this mean that tool icons still point to the original location of a file even when moved?

[sim085]

A .info should rarely be alone, almost always they have a corresponding underlying "real" file.

Yes, but what I managed to do is have two .info files (tools) in different locations pointing at the same program. I feel that is better at organising files rather then just copy paste both the .info & related file to any other location needed.