opener is a small Rust crate (library) for opening a file or link with the configured default application. I developed this library while working on a contribution to rustup and Cargo. rustup supports opening a local copy of Rust’s documentation in the user’s browser, and Cargo supports generating documentation for a crate and also opening it in the user’s browser. This browser-opening functionality was duplicated in these two tools, with slightly different behavior, so I saw an opportunity to extract the functionality into a crate that each tool could depend on. And so, opener was born.
opener supports the major desktop operating systems: Windows, Mac, and Linux. Each has its own implementation; Windows and Mac have fairly straightforward system-provided means of implementing the functionality, but Linux is much trickier due to the wide variety of Linux distributions and desktop environments. To deal with this, the crate embeds the xdg-open script from xdg-utils, and delegates the task to that script.