Question that can't find answer (Deficons & def)
 

Hello to everybody
Sorry for the newbie question but here is the situation
I have a vanilla clean installation of WB 3.1.4.1 and i want to explicity which filetype associates with which application.
For start i wanted to handle the archives file types..luckily for that i found a def_archive..put it in the ENV-Archives/Sys and Voila i had the option to change tool..did that presto it works.
But what about and how the rest of filtypes.
Lets take it simply , filetype .jpg or even .iff ..how on earth i will tell the system that if the file is :.jpg or .iff it will use some Image Viewer
I downloaded Deficons 44 which installed seemingly fine (it wanted MUI so i installed that first) and placed Nicely in the WBStartUp
Reboot double click DefIcons ....nothing is just sitting dead
Went to CLI run it from there...message "DefIcons removed"
So what is the deal..what i am doing wrong and i just can't make it work ?
Also supposingly DefIcons managed to work can i create my own def e.g. def_images and put all the image filetypes to this single def?
I have looked just about everywhere but none of the answers helped.
Environment WINUAE

DefIcon is a background task. I will run in the background. DefIconsPrefs should have a GUI.

Try def_jpeg.info, def_iff.info, def_lha.info, def_zip.info, ... You can add icons by yourself or just download dozens from Aminet.

Just checked
DefIconsPrefs is in Prefs but when i double click it nothing
How to add defs by myself ?

DefIconPrefs needs Reaction and several files from OS 3.5/3.9 installed:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=104660 post #4

Let me research it a bit more...it helped on another case...but ...:)

I had DefIcons running in the past but never used it on my OS 3.1 system. So never saw DefIconsPrefs. I guess that you can add/edit/... def_<name>.info icons with it and assign filetypes to them. However, def_ icons are just normal icons from type project located in ENVARC:Sys/. I think the easiest way is to download dev_ icon packs and copy them to ENVARC:Sys/. You also can copy icons or draw/edit them yourself if you like.

Maybe a little technical explanation:

DefIcons enables a call-back hook which is called by workbench.library whenever it encounters a file without an icon.

The hook uses the deficons.prefs file in ENV: to decide of which type the file is. Depending on that type it chooses a def_xy.info file from ENV:Sys.

The deficons.prefs file is organised hierarchically which means for example that if def_jpeg.info does not exist, it tries def_picture.info and if this does not exist, too, it uses def_project.info.

Deficons.prefs is an executable file. Originally it was built from Assembler source code. The structure of the file is described in the NewIcons developer docs.

Writing an editor for the deficons.prefs file is not trivial because to save new prefs you have to rebuild the executable hunk structure without an assembler/linker doing it for you.

I think that this is the key...my installation is vanilla 3.1.4.1 measuring less than 3mb size so probably a Lot of libraries are missing..
Because it was just for fun probably i will abandon it and go with the flow.
Just out of curiosity is there a utility that when i click such an executable will show me what is getting and what is missing...if you are familiar with Windows i am referring to Process Monitor.

Thanks for the info
Since you know in depth regarding Amiga i guess workbench.library is somewhat like explorer on Windows.

I think I was mistaken, it's rather icon.library.

icon.library and workbench.library together are the public interface (API) of Workbench.

Workbench is not really like Windows Explorer because it only acts on icons. It's not supposed to act like a file explorer, more like another kind of start menu.

Ok np...thanks