Sure, GUIs are nice and all, but I'm more of a command-line user. But does that mean that I have to cross the rubicon into command-line land and never come back? I should hope not!

One thing that happens with me a lot is that I'm typing on my terminal, and I find I want to open that spreadsheet document. At this point, I am faced with a choice. I can either strain my brain to remember what command-line options it takes to start the OpenOffice program correctly (was that ooffice -calc? Or openoffice -calc? Or soffice -calc? Or maybe openoffice-calc...). If I decide not to go that route, I could always open up a nautilus window at my home directory, and then navigate down whatever thorny pathways I've taken to reach the little crevasse in my filesystem that I'm working in. Sure, I did it once and I could do it again, but I've already got a command prompt right there!

Mac OS X offers a program called "open", where you type open <filename> and you get the same behavior you would've gotten if you'd double-clicked it in the finder. Excellent! That way, you don't need to even remember which application you have set as your preference for opening pdfs.

I set out to implement a similar feature for users of Gnome. I call it gnopen. Now I can do something like:

% gnopen SpreadsheetFile.xls

and it'll open just as if I had double-clicked it.

About the name

Normally, I am opposed to giving programs names that start with "g", or "k" or "py" or "lin". I think, "Hey, just give your software a discriptive name. I don't need to know how much you like gnu." Plus, it can get embarassing if you write a portable application (which you should). For example, my favorite python debugger is called "WinPDB", despite the fact that it works on many platforms. Or what about people who play "Lincity" under FreeBSD?

The reason I chose to name this program after its tech stack is that it is inherently not portable. What the program does is open files the way Gnome opens files. One day, there can be a"kopen", as well, and it would be handy to not have their names conflict.