[NCLUG] gnome-open configuration or alternative

[S Luke Jones]

Brett Johnson wrote:
> I think most distros support the "update-alternatives" concept now.  For
> your particular situation, you'd likely want to type:
>
> "sudo update-alternatives --config gnome-text-editor", and pick the text
> editor you want gnome to use.  "sudo update-alternatives --all" will
> take you through the whole list of alternatives (there are a lot).
>
> Also, in gnome, you can use nautilus (the gnome file browser) to set up
> file opening preferences.  Simply open a directory with a .txt file
> (from your "Places" menu), then right click on a .txt file.  Choose
> "Properties" from the drop-down menu, and select the "Open With" tab.
>
>   
Thanks, Brad. That's more information than I had before. I'm 100% 
gnome-clueless. (Also KDE. The last window manager I learned how to 
configure was fvwc.)

So I did this, as you suggest, and yes, I can see it's doing what I need 
to have done. But so far as I can tell it doesn't provide a command line 
interface to _use_ the data I just configured. It only sets up file 
associations for the windowing system/file manager/desktop environment 
to use.

But.

That's my point. I don't care about the windowing system. I live inside 
a terminal.

What I'm looking for is a single command-line tool (on the Mac it's 
called "open") that is aware of this update-alternatives-kind of 
database of filetype:application associations, and that lets me open the 
different sorts of file from the command line with a single command. So 
I don't type 'gv' or 'acroread' or 'gvim' or 'epiphany -some -weird 
-options' but simply 'open' and the tool looks up those commands and 
exec's them appropriately.

Is there anything like that in gnome? (Or better yet, 
windowing-system-agnostic?)