---
name: "exo-open"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "exo"
version: "4.20.0-2"
release: "Arch Linux 2026-11-01"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/exo-open"
---

# exo-open(1)

Open URLs and launch preferred applications

## NAME

exo-open - Open URLs and launch preferred applications

## SYNOPSIS

**exo-open** \[\[url\]...\]

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

## DESCRIPTION

**exo-open** is a command line frontend to the **Xfce Preferred Applications** framework. It can either be used to open a list of *url*s with the default URL handler or launch the preferred application for a certain category.

## INVOCATION

**exo-open** either takes a list of URLs and tries to open each of them using the default handler, or, when using the **--launch** tries to launch the preferred application for a certain category, optionally passing any number of *parameter*s to the application.

### Options

**-?**, **--help**

Print brief help and exit.

**-v**, **--version**

Print version information and exit.

**--working-directory** *directory*

When using the **--launch** option and this option is specified as well, the application will be run in the given *directory*. This is primarily useful when running the preferred **TerminalEmulator** from another application and you want the command in the terminal window to be run in a specific directory.

**--launch** *category* *parameters...*

Launch the preferred application for the given *category* with the optional *parameters...*, where *category* is either **WebBrowser**, **MailReader**, **TerminalEmulator** or **FileManager**.

If you do not specify the **--launch** option, **exo-open** will open all specified URLs with their preferred URL handlers. Else, if you 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).

## COMPOSING EMAILS

**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. This syntax is supported by all **MailReader**s. In addition the **MailReader**s 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:) and 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.

## AUTHOR

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

This manual page was provided by Benedikt Meurer \<benny@xfce.org\>.