Bridging the gap between Emacs and Gnome

I use Emacs whenever I can (which is, nowadays, for almost all the work I do) but I still need to switch away occasionally for some apps. Usually this involves starting up Nautilus, navigating to a directory, finding some files (e.g. PDFs or web pages), and double-clicking them. I wrote some Emacs functions to do the equivalent from Dired, avoiding the need to use Nautilus at all. This makes Dired a lot more useful as a file manager/browser for all kinds of files, not just text files.

gnome-open opens a file using the same application which would have been used to open it had you double-clicked it in Nautilus (Evince for PDFs, OpenOffice for OO.o docs, etc.). The following function takes a file and calls gnome-open on it:

(defun gnome-open-file (filename)
  "gnome-opens the specified file."
  (interactive "fFile to open: ")
  (let ((process-connection-type nil))
    (start-process "" nil "/usr/bin/gnome-open" filename)))

In a Dired buffer, the following function gnome-opens the file on which your cursor is sitting:

(defun dired-gnome-open-file ()
  "Opens the current file in a Dired buffer."
  (interactive)
  (gnome-open-file (dired-get-file-for-visit)))

I bound it to 'E':

(add-hook 'dired-mode-hook (lambda () (local-set-key "E" 'dired-gnome-open-file)))