Andy Holmes wrote an excellent overview of XDG Intents in his “Best Intentions” blog post, covering the foundational concepts and early proposals. Unfortunately, due to GNOME Foundation issues, this work never fully materialized. As I have been running into more and more cases where this would provide a useful primitive for other features, I tried to continue the work. The specifications have evolved as I worked on implementing them in glib, desktop-file-utils and ptyxis. Here’s what’s changed: