Goosh.org: The Unofficial Google Shell

If you are a shell lover, then you really will say "Wow, I'm Feeling Lucky!" after I tell you that there's a command line interface (CLI) for google now. Goosh.org, which bills itself "the unofficial google shell," puts a Unix-like CLI to Google on a web page using the magic of Ajax. Simply head to goosh.org and you will feel at home if you do much work in a shell daily.

You can type `help' to list all available commands.

Currently the function of these commands is very simple, it does what it is said to do. You can also see the usage of a command by typing ``help cmd'', where `cmd' is the command you want to learn. Note that there are aliases for most commands. They are similar to the aliases you create for commands in a real *nix shell. You can use these aliases instead of the full name of the corresponding commands. For example, type ``s goosh.org'' to search the web for `goosh.org'. This will give you the results in a similar format when you issue ``ls -l'' in a real *nix shell. Note that it gives you only 4 results. To get more, use the command `more'. When you want to go for a result, you have two choices: type command ``go num'' or ``open num'', where `num' is the number identifying a result. The former will open the result in the current tab, while the latter will open the result in a new window. There's no way to open the result in a new tab for the time being. That's annoying, I know, especially when you have a tabed brwoser like Firefox. If you do not want to go to the goosh.org page everytime, you can also add goosh.org to your Firefox search box using the `addengine' command. Now you can simply issue a command in your search box as if you are in the goosh CLI. After you press enter, it will send your command to goosh to be executed and get you to the goosh.org CLI with the result of the command displayed. Other commands let you request other services by gogole.

I like the idea of goosh though it's still not that smart as a real *nix shell, it lets me google more efficiently without always touching the mouse. It reminds me of an experimental search feature in google lab, keyboard shortcuts. These keyboard shortcuts are almost the same with those of Vim. Though it also can not open a search result in a new tab (I have suggested it do in the future but not sure whether google will implement the feature or not) I find it so useful that after a few days I can not go without it. For example, two days ago, I installed a Firefox add-on called google preview. With it on, I can not use those keyboard shortcuts properly (or say when using those keyboard shortcuts, I can not preview a search result). Anyway I simply uninstalled the add-on even though I find the thumbnails prefixing search results pretty nice ...