open note custom

[GuShaocheng]

Description

Dear developer,

I am reporting a disfunction of 'open note custom'. According to my investigation, it failed to call x-terminal-emulator after choosing a custom app from mimeopen and the falled back to konsole in my system.
However, the 'mimeopen' ended too fast in my system before opening the chosen app (from about version 0.99.0). So there won't be an action for 'open note custom'.
Details are below, could you please help? Thanks.

No. 1, (core bug), related to app_context.js openCustom function:
const h = ${d} -e 'mimeopen -d "${s}"';
If mimeopen ends too faster than the chosen app launches, it will happen as what I describe. If I add 'sleep 1' after mimeopen, e.g., konsole -e bash -c 'mimeopen -d "xxx.html"; sleep 1', the chosen app will launch properly. Maybe you have better idea to handle it elegantly?

No 2, (not serious), it seems that openCustom is not compatible with x-terminal-emulator or x-terminal-emulator -e has a bug.

PS: This has been posted together with another closed bug #7147. To make it clear, I separate the issues. Thanks.

TriliumNext Version

0.99.1

What operating system are you using?

Ubuntu

What is your setup?

Local + server sync

Operating System Version

Ubuntu 24.04

Error logs

Error log for No. 2

app_context.js:26 Open Note custom: Failed to open file with x-terminal-emulator: Error: Command failed: x-terminal-emulator -e 'mimeopen -d "xxx.html"'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator", line 126, in
TERMINATOR.layout_done()
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/terminatorlib/terminator.py", line 326, in layout_done
terminal.spawn_child()
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/terminatorlib/terminal.py", line 1562, in spawn_child
self.vte.feed(_('Unable to find a shell'))
TypeError: Must be number, not str

[dosubot]

This is a known issue in TriliumNext: when using 'open note custom' with mimeopen, the terminal sometimes closes before the chosen app launches, due to a race condition in the command execution. The workaround of adding sleep 1 after mimeopen (like konsole -e bash -c 'mimeopen -d "xxx.html"; sleep 1') is effective but not considered an elegant or permanent solution. The root cause is that Trilium's process doesn't robustly wait for the spawned application to start before closing the terminal, which can prevent the app from launching as expected. Compatibility problems with x-terminal-emulator (especially with the -e flag) are also reported, and some terminal emulators (like Terminator) may throw errors or fail to find a shell in this context. There is currently no official fix, and alternatives like parsing mimeopen's output or improving process management are not yet implemented in Trilium. For now, the sleep 1 workaround is the most reliable method available.
See discussion and details

To reply, just mention @dosu.

---

^{How did I do? Good | Irrelevant | Incorrect | Verbose | Hallucination | Report 🐛 | Other}