Just Open

I have a small problem: I don’t always remember name of the applications, thus it takes time to think what was again the tool to open for example PDF files or to view images.

If you’re graphical user interfaces user it’s just easy to click them. But when you live on the terminal - like me - you can’t just do that.

Of course there’s xdg-open which you can run from terminal as well when hosted by graphical env, but sometimes you want to open the files with non-graphical app.

Thus I created a small tool called just-open. It does what the name says: it just opens the file.

What can I do with it?

Biggest feature is the ability to customize it. You can select any app or command to any mime type.

And you can do mapping from any to any mime type. And when I say mime type, it can just any string. Of course it’s recommended to use real mime types.

I use it just to open any file, and have my own mappings for all most common files. When I encounter new file type I want to support, I just add it there. And since it uses xdg-open as a default fallback, it can already open most of the files.

Further development

It started as a small and quick tool, and I targeted it only for my own use. But made some improvements to make it more usable.

For now I don’t have that many new features on the list, and that’s not even the target. I just want it to open the files. Maybe I’ll do some improvements still, and there might be some bugs. But for me it’s at least quite usable.