The web as command line

by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 29, 2005 | Usefull Things

Google has become more than a traditional search engine to me – it’s become a means of navigation by keyword, like a application launcher on a traditional desktop.
This is of course not optimal, each time I want to generate a random password I used to just search for ‘random password’ and find the first available on line tool and just use that. In time I would know what to search for to find a specific tool I want to use and just repeatedly perform those searches. Not very fast but it worked in some way.
Enter YubNub a full blown command line for the web, users can define a keyword such as ‘g’ any query into YubNub for ‘g something’ will do a Google search for ‘something’.
To take my example of the password generator above further you can define (and someone has indeed done this) a ‘passwd’ command that is a front end to Winguides.com’s password generator. Simply typing ‘passwd 8’ into YubNub will give you 8 character passwords, not too shabby. The idea is sound and I like it, so what’s wrong?
Well lets say my company has it’s own policy for passwords that I’d need to use, I still want to use the web as my command line to this kind of tools but I’m stuck with YubNub’s ‘passwd’ not complying to my policy. I could in theory define a ‘rippasswd’ command that points to an internal server to produce my passwords but that is just bad for many obvious reasons. What you really want is your own version of this, and indeed you can download the YubNub source code and run your own. For most users though I think the full YubNub on their own systems might be overkill or you might just not be a Ruby on Rails fan.
There are other alternatives – one very notable one from Yahoo! called Open Shortcuts – this lets you do something similar by prefixing your keywords on their toolbar with a ! so you could search for “!passwd 8” and achieve the same goals. Yahoo goes a bit further you can create your own ‘passwd’ keyword overriding any existing one which effectively fixes one of the major problems I had with YubNub, except now you have to really be using the Yahoo toolbar which is not an option Yahoo is well known for their very very bad practices with delivering all sorts of nasties onto your computer along with their toolbar, so while the idea is great it isn’t viable.
Back in August I could not sleep one Friday evening and I wrote a self hosted keyword query system very much like YubNub except it is not intended to be open to everyone to add/edit keywords. This is specifically intended to host on your own machines – think company or personal intranet – it allows you to add your own keywords, it has a normal YubNub inspired user interface and also at the moment a Firefox Mycroft search plugin.
You can see my install of it at cmd.devco.net. Having used it now for 5 months I can safely say I cannot imagine my online life without it ever again, it has become as essential to me as Google itself. Looking at my stats I’ve done 2500 queries against it with only 1600 of them being Google, that means it has saved me from the search-click-click-click pain of using online tools that I had before. You can see which commands I have defined on mine here. I am going to release this as opensource to everyone soon, at the moment it requires Postgres but I intend to make it use SQLite instead and polish up the documentation etc a bit first.