Command Line for the Web

flood6 writes "SearchEngineWatch offers a look at a new method of interacting with the Internet, YubNub. This 'social command line for the web' lets users create commands that interact with websites. Currently, most of the commands apply to search, but new commands could work with any site that accepts variables passed with HTML's GET command. For example, iap moon would search the Internet Archive for all media related to 'moon'."

Web apps and the command line

[glinden]

John Gruber wrote a great essay on this called "The Location Field is the New Command Line [daringfireball.net]". As he put it, "Web apps are just so damned easy to use ... It's all about the fact that you just type the URL and there's your email."

More...

[flood6]

I didn't realize it when I submitted the story, but yubnub was created by Jon Aquino [blogspot.com] who recently appeared in /. for his K'nexis Keyboard [slashdot.org]. Also yubnub is developed in the /. darling Ruby on Rails and was Jon's entry into the 2004 Rails Day [slashdot.org].

You can see some more of Jon's gadgets here [blogspot.com].

Speaking of Which

[MankyD]

I just saw this on the page: http://www.yubnub.org/documentation/describe_insta llation/ [yubnub.org]

XMLTerm

[Doc Ruby]

The best version of this concept that I saw was XMLTerm [sourceforge.net]. It's a graphical CLI, in a web page. It's ideally suited to be a CLI for websites, as well as a website implementing a CLI. It was ahead of its time, and went down the drain when the bubble popped. On purely "zeitgeist" problems - it appears to be technically sound. If there's interest, and effort, in this kind of app now, it will be much better to pick up this orphaned OSS project, than to reinvent it.

Do this in your own browser instead...

[Otto]

The only advantage of this is that it's collaborative... and as other users have pointed out, quite a lot of the commands on the site are crap and need moderation of some sort.

But your browser has this built in already.

-If you use IE, you can set up these type of search shortcuts using TweakUI.
-If you use Firefox/Mozilla, you can create bookmarks that implement these sort of shortcuts. There's some examples in your bookmarks menu when you first install Firefox, just look at those for how to do it.

In both cases, after creating them, you can just type "shortcut search terms" in the address to make it do that "search". Doesn't have to be a search of course, it can be any kind of HTTP GET that you want. I have several defined..
-g for quick googling
-imdb for movie lookups
-imdbq for movie quote lookups
-snpp to search the simpsons archives..
-And so on. ;)

this is different from mozilla keywords how?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can type

imdb Terminator

into my mozilla address bar and it does an search on imdb.org for terminator. or

dict antidisestablishmentarianism

and it searches on dictionary.com for "antidisestablishmentarianism"

the only advantage to this that I can see is that it has addresses that I might not have known about. But there are probably better ways of going about this than making a new web page. Perhaps a blog or plugin system for picking which ones you want mozilla to use.

(see http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html [mozilla.org] for how to use moz keywords)

Re:toolbar

[thermostat42]

you mean like Konqueror's web shortcuts [tuxmagazine.com]?

easier with firefox | opera

[^Z]

In FF, you can have bookmarks like this: http://livejournal.com/~%25s/ [livejournal.com] Give it a keyword (say, 'lj'), type in the URL line: lj someusername and someusername's livejournal opens. This is the simplest example. I have several more sophisticated; this mostly obviates the FF search box. And all this with a *very* simple syntax that only allows substitution of one string. Imagine something a bit more powerful in that place.

Konqueror has this

[infolib]

With support for Google, Wikipedia, Leo german dictionary, CPAN and many others. Just type wiki: whatever in the address bar to search Wikipedia for "whatever". I went from knowing jack about these "web shortcuts" to creating my own in five minutes. (Just copy and modify existing ones)

Oh, and you can also use the address bar to ssh for your files (fish:) or get the images of your camera (digikam:). Bow to the power of the KIOslave framework!

Re:YubNub - Ewok speak?

[nmx]

Yes, "yub nub" is Ewok for "freedom."

Rails

[Tobias Luetke]

I think its worth mentioning that YubNub was created for the RailsDay. A one day Ruby on Rails coding contest which was featured in the developer section of slashdot a week or so ago.
Its not the pinnacle of complexity but its still amazing what you can do in just a day. Hats off the the programmer.

Konqueror has done this for years

[Urban Garlic]

The K desktop environment has things called "KIOslaves" which recognize certain pseudo-protocols on the Konqueror location bar (and other places).

Internet examples include "deb:" for Debian package searches, "rf:" for rpmfind, "gg:" for Google, "ggl:" for Google-I-feel-lucky, and "rfc:" for getting RFC text from the IETF website, and "wp:" for Wikipedia. There are lots of these.

Non-internet examples include "man:" for viewing man pages, and "info:" for viewing those otherwise horrible GNU info pages.

Re:Built into Firefox

[SYRanger]

It's actually even better than this manual %s-approach. Right-click on an input-field prior to search, and "bookmark this search" and add a keyword to it. This manual %s-process was integrated like this since 1.0 I think, but still works though.

Re:Seems kinda fadish, but I'll bite

[poot_rootbeer]

how come to get a console in Windows I have to hit WIN+R, "CMD", [Enter].

Well, you could always set up a keyboard shortcut that launched CMD.EXE -- I've got mine mapped to CTRL-ALT-S. I also keep shortcut icons to my Windows and Cygwin shells in the Quick Launch dock, for more easy access.

The more important aspect of your feature request, though, is to make the shell itself dockable: the command line stays out of the way, you call it up only for as long as you need it, and then it hides itself again. I'd like to see someone implement such a feature, too.

Re:toolbar

[MAdMaxOr]

You can use YubNub directly!

Add YubNub to your Firefox address bar by going to about:config and changing keyword.URL to http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command= [yubnub.org]

Plugin/toolbar info here:
http://www.yubnub.org/documentation/describe_insta llation [yubnub.org]

Been doing it for years

[rduke15]

I have been using Perl for years to do simple command line scripts to extract information from web sites. From foreign exchange rates, to looking up owners/addresses of incoming phone numbers, or abreviated weather forecasts or train schedules.

I began when my old laptop took too long to start a web browser. But even though I now always have a web browser window open, typing "xchange 1432 EUR" is still much faster and simpler than navigating to the appropriate web site and filling in forms.

I'm actually surprised to see such an idea posted here as news. I thought that anybody who knows some scripting has always been doing this sort of thing.

Of course, Perl is ideal for this sort of thing, with regular expressions and all the CPAN modules (LWP::Simple, and dozens of others more specialized).

Re:Seems kinda fadish, but I'll bite

[Anonymous Coward]

surfraw already does this. Comes with many distros packagins systems.

google from the console using your fav browser.

Re:It's not social

[numatrix]

Actually, my firefox bookmarks (and relevant keywords) travel with me just fine thanks to bookmarks synchronizer. Of course, now I just have to figure out where that japanese developer's website has gone so I can find new updates to the code if he posts them. Heaven forbid a new ff release break the current stuff. ;-)

Re:Seems kinda fadish, but I'll bite

[aardwolf204]

yeah, the win key is useful.

Win +

R, run
M, minimize all windows
D, show desktop (toggle)
E, explorer

There are some more but those are what I use. And its funny that you mention ctrl+esc because before I had a windows keyboard (Back in 1995), and even for some time after I got a winkeyboard, I would use CTRL+Esc alt the time. Weird how shortcut habbits can change.

Thats my problem, I'm a keyboard shortcut whore because I started in DOS and am not a big fan of windows so whenever I can acomplish something in keystrokes instead of the kludgy mouse I will.

PS. I just shift-tabbed back to add this PS, noting that i subcounciously knew it was three tabs to the submit button. there's my evidence.

Re:Interesting Concept, but needs moderation

[Jugalator]

You've already used a simple command line search ( you're confusing "search" with "internet" by the way ;-) ) -- just look at Google. If you'd prefix your keywords there with "google", they'd instead look like commands, complete with special switches of the kind "filetype:", "site:", and - operators, etc. Search engines are already like generic and quite complex commands.

Re:Seems kinda fadish, but I'll bite

[UbuWu]

It exists for linux: Tilda http://tilda.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] And also you could setup eterm in almost anyway you want... Don't know about Windows...