[shell] Show in finder/explorer

[betamos]

Describe the problem

The shell.open API can be used to open local files (in their respective app) or opening a directory in the finder/explorer-equivalent. In addition to this, I need to "show in finder", i.e. open a directory with a set of files/directories selected.

Describe the solution you'd like

At a minimum, a function that accepts one file or directory and opens its containing directory with that file/dir selected. Ideally, multiple files can be provided, but I think this may be harder to do cross-platform.

Alternatives considered

No response

Additional context

If API additions are difficult, I'm also interested in workarounds.

[FabianLars]

So the main problem here indeed is cross-platform support. Linux is basically ruled out, since xdg-open doesn't support it, we could read the user's preferred explorer app and compare it with a predefined list and spawn them directly.

On the other hand, windows and macos support is fairly easy:

// These are rust commands, not tauri ones btw
// Windows
Command::new("explorer")
        .args(["/select,", "\"path\\to\\file""]) // The comma after select is not a typo
        .spawn()
        .unwrap();
// Alternatively there is a win32 api for this iirc which needs to be used for longer file paths i think.

// macOS
Command::new( "open" )
        .args(["-R", "path/to/file"]) // i don't have a mac so not 100% sure
        .spawn()
        .unwrap();

All that said, i think this would be better suited in a tauri plugin, especially because of linux.

[betamos]

Thanks @FabianLars . Your solution would work even with the JS shell API as well right? I can try these out, and with a fallback (see below) this should work OK for linux as well.

All that said, i think this would be better suited in a tauri plugin

IIUC there's a broader discussion about small core (with an extensive plugin system) vs big functional core, which I will not weigh in on here :) Just for reference, here's some prior art that could be good to know:

Electron has a shell.showItemInFolder(fullPath) API, a quick-n-dirty github search shows 5-15k results, so it does at the very least appear popular.

Here's their Linux version:

https://github.com/electron/electron/blob/31c2b5703a75a5ff2bf0e68f472d9002fe866bfb/shell/common/platform_util_linux.cc#L68

So I guess the answer is it works, but not with a command only.

However, they have a sensible fallback (just open the directory without selecting anything). For my case, this fallback is certainly better than omitting the feature altogether.

[FabianLars]

Your solution would work even with the JS shell API as well right?

Hopefully, yes.

IIUC there's a broader discussion about small core (with an extensive plugin system) vs big functional core

Well, i don't want to dig in that discussion either (although generally i think it makes sense to not integrate everything into the core), but for me the main selling point of plugins is that it can be implemented regardless of tauri's release cycle and feature-freeze.

Here's their Linux version:

Ah yeah, totally forgot about the dbus option (probably cause we don't use that anywhere yet), but of course this is a little bit more complicated 🤷

[lucasfernog]

We use dbus indirectly in the notifications via notify-rust.

[AlexTMjugador]

A viable workaround command for Linux is dbus-send, which uses D-Bus as highlighted before to do the trick:

dbus-send --session --dest=org.freedesktop.FileManager1 --type=method_call \
/org/freedesktop/FileManager1 org.freedesktop.FileManager1.ShowItems \
array:string:"file:///path/to/file" string:""

This command was suggested by Eduardo Trápani at this Stack Exchange question.

The specification of the related D-Bus interface can be found here.

I think that it is worth noting that, at least on my Debian Unstable KDE desktop, which uses Dolphin 22.08.1 as a file manager, the command fails for paths that contain a comma because dbus-send interprets commas as path separators. Percent-encoding the comma does not work, as Dolphin does not interpret such escape sequences.

[elibroftw]

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/dbus/dbus/-/issues/76 there's even a patch to allow the change! I do wonder how electron/chromium does it. I tried to dig into their code base months ago and stopped as soon as I found out dbus was used in someway.

[elibroftw]

Okay I wrote a generalized Tauri command (Rust 1.58+) with some leeway on Linux.

tauri command code

use std::fs;
#[cfg(target_os = "linux")]
use std::{fs::metadata, path::PathBuf};
use std::path::PathBuf;
use std::process::Command;
#[cfg(target_os = "linux")]
use fork::{daemon, Fork}; // dep: fork = "0.1"

#[tauri::command]
fn show_in_folder(path: String) {
  #[cfg(target_os = "windows")]
  {
    Command::new("explorer")
        .args(["/select,", &path]) // The comma after select is not a typo
        .spawn()
        .unwrap();
  }

  #[cfg(target_os = "linux")]
  {
    if path.contains(",") {
      // see https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/dbus/dbus/-/issues/76
      let new_path = match metadata(&path).unwrap().is_dir() {
        true => path,
        false => {
          let mut path2 = PathBuf::from(path);
          path2.pop();
          path2.into_os_string().into_string().unwrap()
        }
      };
      Command::new("xdg-open")
          .arg(&new_path)
          .spawn()
          .unwrap();
    } else {
      if let Ok(Fork::Child) = daemon(false, false) {
        Command::new("dbus-send")
            .args(["--session", "--dest=org.freedesktop.FileManager1", "--type=method_call",
                  "/org/freedesktop/FileManager1", "org.freedesktop.FileManager1.ShowItems",
                  format!("array:string:\"file://{path}\"").as_str(), "string:\"\""])
            .spawn()
            .unwrap();
      }
    }
  }

  #[cfg(target_os = "macos")]
  {
    Command::new("open")
        .args(["-R", &path])
        .spawn()
        .unwrap();
  }
}

main.rs main

tauri::Builder::default()
    .invoke_handler(tauri::generate_handler![YOUR_OTHER_DEFINED_CMDS, show_in_folder])

Client Side Usage

import { tauri } from '@tauri-apps/api';

async function show_in_folder(path) {
    await tauri.invoke('show_in_folder', {path});
}

[amrbashir]

@elibroftw for the windows implementation, I generally dislike this method as it has a weird behavior of expanding the navigation pane. I personally prefer to use the raw win32 API ShellExecuteW with either open or explore.

[elibroftw]

I've used this command multiple times with my music player and not once has it expanded the navigation panel. The github desktop implementation however always expands the navigation panel. Yes the native code is probably better but this is a hack.

[aleph1]

@elibroftw, when I try to compile your code, I get the following error:

error: cannot find macro `__cmd__OTHER_CMDS` in this scope
.invoke_handler(tauri::generate_handler![OTHER_CMDS, show_in_folder]);

Any ideas?

[FabianLars]

@aleph1 Remove OTHER_CMDS. This was just to show that this is where your own commands would be registered too.