In a GUI, you can right-click on the file icon and select "Open with another application" from the menu. What's your point? You criticise point-and-click GUIs

In a GUI, you can right-click on the file icon and select "Open with another application" from the menu. What's your point? You criticise point-and-click GUIs for poor composability and programmability. Those are valid criticisms; nobody seems to have figured out how to implement these qualities well in a pure point-and-click interface, and this will perhaps never happen. But these criticisms have nothing to do with directly reflecting the abstractions offered by the operating system. The GUI offers access to the same abstractions; it's manipulating them that is different. And the Unix command line is not particularly well-designed either. I can already spot a potential bug in the sample you gave: what happens if your list-generating command outputs a file name containing a space? (Don't answer "don't use spaces, then"; it's as valid character as any other.) You probably know how to fix this mistake, but have you thought why you made it in the first place? It is a consequence of one of the poorer choices in the design of Unix: basing IPC on text streams that each program has to parse and serialise on its own.