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 the user's default text editor is. 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 sound-editor image-editor image-viewer

Perhaps you could specify text-based and gui applications preferences by running using "--tui" or "--gui". Not specifying a 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.

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?

To summarize: 1. It is sometimes useful to launch applications with a command. 2. We often times don't know the name of the program that we want to use. 3. A few simple generic command names could be useful, especially to sophisticated users. 4. I'm not suggesting that we force users to use these commands and I'm not suggesting that clicking on things (file icons and program shortcuts) in order to open apps isn't a great method.