Opening .circ files in Brandonsim

August 22, 2017

Sometimes you gotta have pretty icons and pretty buttons, y’know? In the case of Brandonsim on GNU/Linux, specifically to give it and .circ files pretty icons which open Brandonsim when clicked, do one of the following:

Option 1: Use a Script

Download Brandonsim-X.Y.Z.jar from T-Square, put it somewhere permanent (moving it will break the files the script creates), and run the following command:

curl -Ls https://austinjadams.com/img/blog/open-circ-in-brandonsim/brandonsim-setup.sh | bash

After the script completes, log out and log back in, just in case.

Option 2: By Hand

If you don’t like piping random shell scripts from the internet into a shell, you can do the following instead:

1. Run mkdir -p ~/.local/share/applications/ ~/.local/share/mime/packages/

2. Install icons stolen from Brandon’s Brandonsim repo by running:

    tmpfile=$(mktemp --suffix=.png); for size in 16 20 24 48 64 128; do curl -L https://austinjadams.com/img/blog/open-circ-in-brandonsim/brandonsim-icon-$size.png -o "$tmpfile" && xdg-icon-resource install --size $size "$tmpfile" brandonsim-icon; done; rm "$tmpfile"
   

3. Create ~/.local/share/mime/packages/brandonsim.xml with the following contents:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <mime-info xmlns='http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info'>
      <mime-type type="application/brandonsim">
        <comment>Brandonsim circuit</comment>
        <glob pattern="*.circ"/>
        <icon name="brandonsim-icon"/>
      </mime-type>
    </mime-info>
   

4. Run update-mime-database ~/.local/share/mime

5. Create ~/.local/share/applications/brandonsim.desktop with the following contents, except with your path to the Brandonsim jar instead of /PATH/TO/YOUR/Brandonsim-2.7.4.jar:

    [Desktop Entry]
    Version=1.0
   
    Type=Application
    Name=Brandonsim
    Icon=brandonsim-icon
    GenericName=Logic circuit simulator
    Comment=Digital logic circuit simulator
    Categories=Development
    MimeType=application/brandonsim;
    Exec=java -jar /PATH/TO/YOUR/Brandonsim-2.7.4.jar %U
    Terminal=false
    StartupWMClass=com-cburch-logisim-Main
   

6. Run xdg-mime default brandonsim.desktop application/brandonsim

Might need to log out and log back in somewhere in there, YMMV. Just restarting gnome-shell at the end worked for me.