I believe this is simplified to open on most platforms

that's cool

I've always just done

dolphin .

but that's nifty to know!

I'd create an alias: alias open=xdg-open

It's easier to type in that way

xdg-open is very nifty, especially due to its ubiquitousness on a variety of distributions. You can even have a look inside to see that it is actually a shell script yet again invoking other 'opening' scripts in the background!

I wrote a little bit about it and an alternative to it called mimeo not too long ago. That one can even open things by advanced filters such as regexes. So you could e.g. open https://eff.org in Firefox and http://localhost:3000 in a different application or other advanced shenanigans - though I've never used such advanced features much.

<3 XDG, bringing so much utility and cross-compatibility to Linux regardless of your distro and window manager

xdg-open is one of the most used commands on my system. Video files, movies, pdfs, etc if I want to use the default application to open anything I use it. No need to memorize each application' commands.

Now you know about the command and can alias it to whatever floats your boat!

‘open .’
‘exhume /my/file’
‘liberate my.site’

Between this and rifle, all things are possible. Enjoy.

Nice!

Users of GNOME-derived window managers might also want to look into the gio command that abstracts a lot of GUI things through the command line. Most of the functionality duplicates more basic commands, but these use the GUI's API / behaviour where possible.

The best example might be gio trash which can delete things to the desktop Rubbish/Recycle/Trash bin rather than vanish them completely as rm does.

A pity there's no xdg- wrapper that encompasses gio and whatever KDE and others do though. Maybe that'll happen one day.

thanks.

I prefer thunar &