Changes to snap external editor support

Hello Joplin community, I thought I'd post a little update here about the snap because there's some changes to the external editor support in the 2.1.8 release which should be rolling out in the next few hours (I was a little delayed pushing it whilst looking into this!). The external editor support is probably the single biggest complaint for the snap right now, and so I thought I'd keep people updated to help with support.

There's two changes. The first change is likely hard to notice for most people, however the gist of it is the Joplin snap should play nicer with other sandboxed applications (snap and flatpak). Prior to this update, if you installed an external editor that was also sandboxed, then there's a chance the the external editor couldn't open Joplin's files and would show access denied. Now, this should "just work", assuming that you have a new enough version of the xdg-desktop-portal package. To get Joplin snap to play nice with other snaps the xdg-desktop-portal version needs to be version 1.8.1 or higher (Ubuntu 21.04, Fedora 34, Debian 11, Arch btw), but the Joplin snap should play nicer with Flatpaks with nearly any version still in use.

The second change is regarding the UI that allows people to select the external editor they want. This is still set to learn about user preferences after pressing accept 3 times in a row, but there's now a somewhat easier way to help reset this.

In the external editor settings, if the path value is set to /usr/bin/joplin-open, and the arg value is set to --ask, Joplin will now unconditionally ask what application to open when using the external editor, which can be used to either reset the preference by accepting a new selection and removing --ask, or kept on permamently if desired.

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Although unlikely, the user should probably avoid setting the path to /bin/xdg-open. Although this has been the default previously, it's now inferior vs /usr/bin/joplin-open, the new default value, as it's this binary specifically that helps with the sandboxing improvements above.

In the future I'd like to see if I could potentially adjust the UI to express the available options better, but unfortunately lacking translation and having to keep up with the normal releases, this might be hard to achieve.

Cheers

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