I want to re-open this topic as a new wish, because I really think this functionality should be included in XY in the first place.
The current workarounds are far from user friendly and have their own flaws which make them equally useless to most people.
Placing a shortcut in the Catalog may work fine for clicking on it, but you lose the ability to pass files with "open the selected items" or drag and drop, since it's not a supported file type.* Furthermore, shortcuts must have absolute paths, so it is no help when the user is using XY with programs on a portable drive.
Using a batch file works better and allows for relative paths, but means we completely lose the program's icon. If you have a number of programs where you need to do this, all those default batch icons become a bit annoying. You also have to put up with console windows popping up for a split second.
That leaves the last workaround of actually creating a launcher and compiling it into an EXE or COM with the original program's icon.
While that will work perfectly, anyone going this far is going to find it extremely silly that such basic functionality is missing from XY. Meanwhile, the users who aren't programmers are stuck with all the annoyances of the workarounds.
I cannot think of any reason this isn't already part of XY. So I suggest adding fields to the UDC -> Open With and Catalog items that allows the user to enter arguments which will be inserted before the selected item(s).
Please! I'm really getting sick of having to compile all these little launchers.
*This however does work when used with the UDC -> Open With command, but that doesn't really help with the catalog, or the absolute path issue.
