mime.types

Chawan uses the mime.types file to map file extensions to MIME types (also known as Content-Type).

MIME types in turn are used by mailcap to decide how to present a certain file to the user (display as text, use external viewer, save, etc.) See cha-mailcap(5) for details of how that works.

Search path

Chawan parses all mime.types files defined in external.mime-types. When no mime.types file is found, the built-in MIME type associations are used.

The default search path for mime.types files is:

$HOME/.mime.types:/etc/mime.types:/usr/etc/mime.types:/usr/local/etc/mime.types

Format

The mime.types file is a list of whitespace-separated columns. The first column represents the mime type, all following columns are file extensions.

Lines starting with a hash character (#) are recognized as comments, and are ignored.

Example:

# comment
application/x-example   exmpl   ex

This mime.types file would register the file extensions “exmpl” and “ex” to be recognized as the mime type application/x-example.

Note

Chawan only uses mime.types files for finding mailcap entries; buffers use an internal mime.types file for content type detection instead.

The default mime.types file only includes file formats that buffers can handle, which is rather limited (at the time of writing, 7 file formats). Therefore it is highly recommended to configure at least one external mime.types file if you use mailcap.

See also

cha(1) cha-mailcap(5)