I'd love to understand this better. My first reaction was too, that it's much more complex than it probably should be. OTOH, as I said, after reading through it

I'd love to understand this better. My first reaction was too, that it's much more complex than it probably should be. OTOH, as I said, after reading through its code, it doesn't seem to do much more than many of its alternatives 1. it can be called with just a single argument 2. if it's running under a DE, it delegates to the ${de}-open. In the same fashion, it handles some esoteric cases, like flatpak and WSL2... 3. if it's not running under a DE or it's one of the esoteric cases, it parses $1 and reads associations from an INI file 4. finally if the executable is supplied in a form of desktop file, it resolves it to a command Most of its alternatives do steps 1 and 3, and do not do steps 2 and 4. And it doesn't seem like too much incidental complexity tbh. Step 4 seems totally legit. Step 2 — controversial, but I can rationalize this with legacy and backward compatibility. And even when we start thinking about all those ${de}-open... Probably those are needed for some eye candy, like jumping icons in the dock when an app is launching... IDK, I'm just speculating.