EXO-OPEN(1)

✨ exo-open ✨

okay bestie so this is the manual page for exo-open from the Xfce Users Manual — yes it's literally the EXO-OPEN(1) page, we're doing this 💅

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🎀 NAME 🎀

exo-open — open URLs and launch your preferred applications, no cap 🦋

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

exo-open [[url]...]

exo-open --launch [category] [[parameter]...]

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so exo-open is a command line frontend to the Xfce Preferred Applications framework, and honestly? iconic. it can do two whole things:

• open a list of urls with the default URL handler 👑
• launch the preferred application for a certain category ✨

pick your fighter, bestie.

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🌈 INVOCATION 🌈

exo-open either:

• takes a list of URLs and tries to open each of them using the default handler, or
• when you use --launch, tries to launch the preferred application for a certain category — optionally passing any number of parameters to that application 🫶

🍓 Options 🍓

• -?, --help — print brief help and dip. that's it, that's the whole thing 😌
• -v, --version — print version information and exit. slay.
• --working-directory directory — when you're using the --launch option and you also specify this one, the application will be run in the given directory. this is primarily useful when you're running the preferred TerminalEmulator from another application and you want the command in the terminal window to be run in a specific directory. very specific-girlboss energy 💅
• --launch category parameters... — launch the preferred application for the given category with the optional parameters..., where category is either WebBrowser, MailReader, TerminalEmulator or FileManager. pick one, bestie, those are the options 🔥

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okay so real talk on the logic here: if you do not specify the --launch option, exo-open will open all specified URLs with their preferred URL handlers. else, if you do specify the --launch option, you can select which preferred application you want to run, and pass additional parameters to the application (i.e. for TerminalEmulator you can pass the command line that should be run in the terminal). iykyk 💖

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💌 COMPOSING EMAILS 💌

ngl this part is lowkey the cutest. exo-open allows users and developers to open the preferred email composer from the command line by simply invoking:

exo-open mailto:USER@HOST.TLD

this will open the composer window with USER@HOST.TLD as the recipient ✨ and this syntax is supported by all MailReaders, periodt.

in addition, the MailReaders that ship as part of libexo also support extended mailto:-URIs (but be aware that user-defined mailers do not necessarily support this 🙈), which allows you to also:

• specify default values for the subject and the body of the mail
• add additional recipients (both Cc: and To:)
• attach files to emails

for example:

mailto:foo@foo.org?cc=bar@bar.org&subject=Foo&attach=/foo/bar.txt

tells the composer to start an email to foo@foo.org and bar@bar.org with Foo in the subject and the file /foo/bar.txt attached to the message. the way that just works 😭💜

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

exo-open was written by Benedikt Meurer <benny@xfce.org>.

this manual page was provided by Benedikt Meurer <benny@xfce.org>. thank you king 🫶

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and that's the whole page bestie!! 💖 this one's from the Xfce manual, dated 06/28/2023, and yeah — EXO-OPEN(1), we love her, we stan, go open some URLs fr fr 🌸✨🦋