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 Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/619913 Title: open should be an alias to xdg-open To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xdg-utils/+bug/619913/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
