Mimic

Mimic is a simple Linux utility for managing MIME type to application associations. It shows registered file types and lets you choose which application opens them by default. The app writes to ~/.config/mimeapps.list through GIO, so xdg-open and desktop environments respect your choices.

Designed with minimalism and keyboard navigation in mind — a good fit for users of tiling window managers.

Features

• Browse all registered MIME types with human-readable descriptions
• Filter by category and search by name
• Set the default application for any file type
• Hide rarely used types by default
• Keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+H to focus search, Esc to clear it

Dependencies

• GTK4
• GIO / GLib
• Rust toolchain (edition 2024)

Building

cargo build --release

The binary will be at target/release/mimic.

Installing (Arch Linux)

Build and install the package from packaging/arch. The source archive is generated locally from the current git tag, so no download is needed.

cd packaging/arch
./make-src.sh          # creates mimic-0.1.0.tar.gz from tag v0.1.0
makepkg
sudo pacman -U mimic-0.1.0-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

Manual install

cargo build --release
install -Dm755 target/release/mimic ~/.local/bin/mimic
install -Dm644 data/org.mimic.Mimic.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
install -Dm644 data/org.mimic.Mimic.svg ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/

License

MIT