First Custom Software Project: mkprtcl

As CoreNGS aims to better support even basic needs, we are excited to announce mkprtcl, a new system command dedicated to URL protocol creation and management. The goal is to support applications and developers who have specific URL protocol needs. Inspiration for this project comes from a video by ThioJoe, embedded below, or linked here.

Will users benefit from mkprtcl? We believe so, yes. One of the many goals with mkprtcl is to support the major browsers (Chromium, Firefox, and derivatives). Users already see use of custom protocols - as demonstrated/mentioned by ThioJoe in his video. While creating these custom protocols in Windows is rather simple ( as explained in the video at timestamp 11:20), it's as simple as opening the Windows graphical registry editor, and set up the basic file structure, and in command set what actually happens. Our goal is to give developers access to this on UNIX-like systems (CoreNGS, xBSD, Linux, Illumos, etc). There are guides on how to do this, but they can get rather involved, and could be problematic for some situations, beginners, and automatic scripts.How will mkprtcl work? It will be a simple command, that allows users to set basic information like what to execute, what is the protocol name. To give a short overview.The command's official usage will be mkprtcl [protocol-name] [executes] [options...] so for an example, if we were to make a protocol for searching DuckDuckGo, with the protocol ddg://, it will be created by running mkprtcl ddg 'xdg-open "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=$REF" --passes-reference true. The ${REF} stands for reference pass through.

We already plan to support Firefox, and we will look into what needs to be done for Chromium. It will be released along with CoreNGS 1.0, and with an unknown Potabi Systems release for proper use.