I have to bump this again. Personallly, I've been using bash alias open=xdg-open for years. It's EXTREMELY useful and convenient. And I do really want to stress that: even though I generally avoid non-standard aliases for the command line (just so that my habits won't depend too much on a widely unavailable setup) — still, I can't work without just two aliases; one of them is open=xdg-open.
I state that *twice* as long name is unacceptably long for the ubiquitously common action of "opening" (think: double-clicking) a file or directory. Users regularly want to open files and dirs. But personally I don't care about fancy Freedesktop shims taking my time for typing meaningless barely comprehensible characters, or for setting up the alias in the few-hundredth time again. On the other hand, opening a new text-mode VT is... uhh... extremely uncommon need in the environment of a graphical desktop, I'd say. Especially when we do already have a bunch of ones pre-opened by getty. Also, the name isn't covered by fundamental standards akin to POSIX, even the manpage says "Earlier, openvt was called open"; so the change is not going to break compatibility from that side. I will also go as far as to request concrete examples of automated software which actually opens interactive terminal sessions using openvt(1), and relying on the spelling of "open". Overall, the compatibility argument doesn't convice me a tiniest bit, again personally. I don't see a huge tradeoff in accepting the miniscule risks of the namespace change VS massive productivity gains for the proper, convenient, and requested use of the name. To summarize, my opinion is that some future-oriented revision for the use of "open" command needs a great deal of more discussion. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to xdg-utils in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/619913 Title: open should be an alias to xdg-open Status in “xdg-utils” package in Ubuntu: Opinion Bug description: Binary package hint: xdg-utils From MacOSX, many people are very used to the `open` command which behaves very similar to xdg-open. It would be nice to have such an alias or symlink by default. ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04 Package: xdg-utils 1.0.2-6.1ubuntu3 ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-24.39-generic-pae 2.6.32.15+drm33.5 Uname: Linux 2.6.32-24-generic-pae i686 NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia Architecture: i386 Date: Wed Aug 18 17:16:14 2010 Dependencies: InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100427) PackageArchitecture: all ProcEnviron: LANGUAGE= LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SHELL=/bin/bash SourcePackage: xdg-utils To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xdg-utils/+bug/619913/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
