KFM Manual - Mime Types

## What are data types

A file contains only bits and bytes. One must know how to interprete them to give them a meaning. A usual method to archive this is to look at the filename. If it ends with `.gif` for example, you assume that it is a GIF image. That's what most desktop environments (further on called DE) do. KFM does this, too, since it is very fast, but not convenient. If the extension is not available one does not know of which data type the file is and that means in turn that KFM does not know which appliaction can deal with the data. So if KFM can not figure out the data type by extension it will have a look in the first bytes of the file and lookup some stuff in its magic file. This is called automatic-mime-type-detection-magic and works quite nice. So if the datatype has an entry in the magic file `$KDEDIR/share/mimelnk/magic`, then KFM would know that the file `MyGirlFriend` contains an image.

You must register data types in KFM. This poor little helper of yours must know common extensions of this data type, an icon, some descriptive text, perhaps a default application ( we will learn more about this later ) and the mime type.

## What is a Mime Type

Mime types are an internet standard. This standard is a naming scheme for data types. A data types name is devided in two sections. The first one tells about the general kind of data ( image, video, audio, text ... ) and since there are different kinds of text ( C-sources, english text, ... ) and different formats for saving images and so on, the second part tells abou the special format. A good example is `image/gif`. The first part tell, its an image and the second one tells, it is saved in GIF format.

If you are not shure about the correct mime type, then have a look at the magic file, many many mime types are already registered there.

Usually this chapter is only of interest for system maintainers and application developers. A proper installed KDE should come with all this stuff already done, but some people always want to know how stuff works, so here we go.

The directory `$KDEDIR/share/mimelnk` contains many subdirectories which correspond to the first section of the mime type names. For example our example `image/gif` is represented by a file named `$KDEDIR/share/mimelnk/image/gif.kdelnk`. Every KFM config file has the `.kdelnk` extension. Sometimes KFM hides this extension, since it does not look very nice.

You will find out sooner or later that the directory structure in your global KDE directory is the same as the one in your `~/.kde` directory. As sysadmin on your local Linux box, you may usually want to edit the global configuration, while a user at the universities UNIX cluster may only edit his personal configuration. Everything we say about the `$KDEDIR` directory here, applies to the `~/.kde` directory, too. To edit the global config files in `$KDEDIR` you need a super users password, for the personal stuff of course not.

## Step by step

You may now go on to a step by step tutorial in installing new mime types or stay for some additional lines to read about some internals.

## Internals

The config files are very simple and of course human readable. You can have a look at it here:

    # KDE Config File
    [KDE Desktop Entry]
    Type=MimeType
    MimeType=image/gif
    Icon=image.xpm
    Patterns=*.gif;*.GIF;
    Comment=Gif images
    Comment[de]=GIF Dokument
    Comment[nl]=Gif afbeelding

You dont need to understand what this means, since KFM provides a GUI for you, that makes things much easier. Hackers never the less want to know and hack everything, so here is a brief description.

The first line is the header of every KDE config file. The `Type`line is included in every KFM config file to distinguish the purpose of the config file. This is followed by the mime types name, the icon, a `;` separated list of patterns and comments in english, german, ...

Now the hackers may leave this lesson.