Re: dired: launch program withou stalling emacs

[Jonathan]

On Jul 20, 11:05 pm, suvayu ali <fatkasuvayu+li...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/7/20 suvayu ali <fatkasuvayu+li...@gmail.com>:
>
> > 2009/7/20 Alain Muls <alain.m...@telenet.be>:
>
> >> I am learning to use dired for file operations. I found out how to launch a
> >> program associated with the extension using eg
>
> >> (require 'dired-x)
> >> (setq dired-guess-shell-alist-user
> >>      '(("\\.pdf$" "evince")))
>
> >> The inconvenience of this is that I have to close the program before I can
> >> resume working in emacs. Is there a possibility to launch the pdfviewer
> >> evince and be able to work in emacs without closing the pdfviewer?
>
> > If you are on GNU/Linux you can try `! xdg-open RET'.
>
> > Alain wrote:
>
> > this works fine for PDF files, but it fails on .fig (xfig) or .odt 
> > (openoffice) files.
>
> Hi Alain,
>
> It should work for _all_ files. What xdg-open does is open the file in
> the preferred application as per the settings of the user. If it fails
> for you, then your default applications settings is not what it should
> be.
>
> I am not sure how to correct this from the command line (you can try
> xdg-mime), but from the GUI you can right click a file and set the
> defaults by going to the properties menu on almost any modern window
> manager.
>
> I believe this is getting off-topic on the emacs list beyond this
> point. If your problem persists, try posting on your distro's user
> list. Hope this helps.
>
> --
> Suvayu
>
> Open source is the future. It sets us free.

My problem is not that the OO file does not open, it's that emacs
still remains locked until the file is closed.

Any suggestions on how to invoke xdg-open as a background process?

Jon