Description of problem: Nautilus needs a mechanism to allow the user to add applications to Open With... that appear regardless of file type. For example, Nautilus will apparently only attempt to run a shell script. It should also be easy to edit a shell script. emacs is an example of an application that works with almost any file type. Opening a terminal window in the current directory is another action that would be useful to always be available. When attempting to associate an application with a file, there seems to be no awareness of the applications have been installed. The user should not have to go find the executable for an installed application. (nautilus doesn't seem to do anything with shell scripts. Perhaps it is running the script, but that isn't apparent. I expect it to open a window so that you can watch the script run. I thought the Ask Each Time behavior preference would control this, but I guess not.)
This is much better in gnome 2.8 (although some apps still need to get mimetype info added to their desktop files for it to be perfect).