Opening .blah files in windows

[jack]

I had always been annoyed that windows can't associate a file type with files if they don't have an extension: eg. you can say "Open *.mk files in notepad++" but not "Open files called Makefile in Notepad++".

But then someone pointed out you *can* associate "no extension" with "open in Notepad++". I can't believe I never thought of that.

That's not perfect, because some files with no extension are binary, not text. But I never open those in Windows Explorer, do I? The only reason I ever DO want to open them is to edit them as text. And I generally want to open all scripts, text files, code, etc, etc, in the same program, and it's up to that program to know how to treat them, so I don't care that there's no way of distinguishing in windows.

I don't know if there's a way of treating files that start with a . the same way...

Comments

[simont]

I'm sure someone must have thought of this already, but could you associate a whole load of file extensions including the empty extension with a sort of meta-app whose job is to examine the whole filename and decide what real app to pass it on to? It would be an ugly bodge in that you'd have to keep two loads of configuration (one for Windows's first-level extension-based discrimination, one for the meta-app) neither of which would contain all the data, but it'd be something.

[jack]

Good idea. Yeah, that would totally work. And in fact, everyone who cares about this probably wants the _same_ things: open Makefiles in whatever you open *.mk files in, ignore or run executables, open script files in the same program as .sh, open plain text files in the same program as .txt, etc.

The biggest downside is that I think I got most of the benefit already, so it wouldn't give that much more.