Desktop/Whiteboards/GenericCommandsToDefaultApps

This may be more of a Freedesktop.org suggestion, but there is no reason why it can't start with a distribution like Fedora. I think it would be easier to launch applications if you had the option to run the default application of a particular type from a short, generic, plain language command.

The main reason why this would be useful is because, as a computer user, you are not necessarily going to know the name of a program installed on the computer that you are using that will do what what you want. It isn't silly that we have dozens of text editor programs. What is silly is that we don't necessarily know what command is used (or where in the program menu you need to click) to launch a text editor program. I'm not suggesting that the names of existing programs be changed.

I am suggesting that it would be nice if, for example, you were logged into a KDE session on some random computer and you entered "text-editor" into the "Run Command..." box or in a terminal session, it would launch a text editing program such as kwrite or gedit or whatever your user's default text editor is. If you hadn't specified a default text editor, a sane system wide default would be used, pointing to a text editor that is installed on the computer that you are using. This could be implemented with symbolic links or the alternatives system or perhaps some other way.

Some examples of what default generic commands might be (in English) are: text-editor file-manager email-client web-browser terminal word-processor spreadsheet calculator sound-player image-editor

Perhaps you could specify text-based and gui applications preferences by running using "--tui" or "--gui". Not specifing an text or GUI option would default to whatever environment you are already in. For example, if the "web-browser" command were given from an X session it would perhaps open Firefox. If the same command were issued from the console, it would open in elinks. If the command "web-browser --tui" was given from within konsole (KDE Terminal Program), elinks would open within konsole.

If a generic command name conflicts with an actual installed program, like you actually have an actual program installed in /bin/text-editor, maybe the generic command gets ignored.

Of course there is nothing stopping administrators from implementing this within their own organizations, as many I'm sure have done. But, wouldn't it be nice if some basic commands worked cross-organization, cross-distribution, and cross-platform?