Folder-opening GUI with Lua for all OSes

2
votes

I'm working on an application in Lua and I wish to have the user be able to open a directory in the OS's GUI so they can edit it's contents. I don't care to track any changes made; basically I just want to open a new process. For Windows, I just use os.execute to open a Explorer window; however, I am uncertain how to do something similar for other operating systems. What are the Lua-callable equivalents for Explorer in other systems? I don't mind having to use an external library.

1
lua
This seems to have less to do with Lua and more to do with the binary names of the various file managers and starting them from the command line. If you're using os.execute, then you're in the realm of the operating system's command line, and there isn't much that is very Lua specific beyond that point. – Ryan Stein

1 Answers

0
votes

In Mac OS X you can do os.execute("open ~") to open a Finder window with your home directory.

Back when I used Linux, I wrote a version of open that used nautilus ~ to open the home directory in the file browser in Gnome. I'm not sure the file browser is still called nautilus or what is the equivalent in other Linux distributions.