I want to be able to open files like my operating system does from console.
e.g. a .pdf file should be opened with evince or whatever the default application to open pdfs is. All the other things should work too; images -> eog, text files -> gedit and so on.
I hope that there is a solution for this, it would be really practical.
xdg-open — opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application
But what if you want to change the preferred application from the terminal?
Try this
You can use the xdg-mime program to first check which is the current default application that will open a file and then you can switch it to what ever application you want.
$ xdg-mime query default application/pdf
AdobeReader.desktop
$ xdg-mime default evince.desktop application/pdf
$ xdg-mime query default application/pdf
evince.desktop
Now as mentioned by jokerdino you can use xdg-open to open a file with your preferred application:
$ xdg-open file.pdf
