goosh, the Unofficial Google Shell

ohxten writes "Stefan Grothkopp has come up with a pretty neat tool called goosh. It's essentially a browser-oriented, shell-like interface that allows you to quickly search Google (and images and news) and Wikipedia and get information in a text-only format. This is quite possibly the coolest thing I've seen in a good while."

Lynx

[FST]

In all seriousness, why not just use Lynx if you want text only?

source code says

[LordMyren]

source code says "readable" source code will be posted soon.

i await that.

theres a lot of cool text interfaces happening on the web. theres in browser vi (jsvi), and source code editors like CodeMirror, CodePress, and more[1]. all very cool!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Javascript-based_source_code_editors [wikipedia.org]

Difference?

[Deltaspectre]

What's the difference between this and bash with a few handwritten scripts to grab results? (Other than a local bash shell being more functional than the webpage)

Shells

[ucblockhead]

I'd be more impressed if it were an actual shell.

Re:Totally geeky

[vanyel]

It is amazingly fast, you'd think it was a *real* command line environment: fast and efficient.

Check out JavaScript Shell...

[Anik315]

You can actually take something like JavaScript Shell [squarefree.com] and add JSON based query features to it. This would allow things like command line based search, news... etc and has the advantage of using JavaScript as command syntax. You can write JavaScript functions to access and manipulate JSON variables. (easier said than done, from someone whose done it )

Re:Lynx

[grizdog]

Maybe the plan is to make this the built-in shell on a thin web interface. We've had lots of discussions about this on /. - There are a lot of people who don't want much more than a browser, email client, and a word processor/spreadsheet. This might be the first pass at a shell for this market - they'll probably just use the standard browser, but if there has to be a shell in there somewhere, this might make more sense than bash.

Browser Graphical Commandline

[Doc Ruby]

I'd been excited in the 1990s about a browser growing to include all commandline functionality. Netscape started a project called "XMLterm" which used the browser to send commandlines to the local or a remote host, then display the output in the browser. Which showed some results as clickable icons in that resulting page. But the project never produced a usable release, and seemed to die sometime before Netscape itself turned into Mozilla and then Firefox.

But XMLterm [xmlterm.org] lives! Someone's completing the project. I'm really psyched to see this system work. And even more psyched for the possibility that it could support different "Web APIs" at different hosts it connect to, different DOMs and other object models, perhaps with mappings to some grand unified object model (and browser for it). It seems like a great way to implement a client for goosh, this Google shell.

That would be really cool, and finally start to transcend some of the "CLI vs GUI" ghettoes we've stuck ourselves in. Or at least give the GUI people most of the CLI stuff, except its pure simplicity. Which, as a GUI person who uses CLIs all day long, sounds great to me.

according to urban dictionary

[Anonymous Coward]

according to urban dictionary, goosh is a slang term for vagina. in fact, it's the first entry for a google search of 'goosh'

It's running FreeBSD

[wikes82]

$ uname -a 1) uname 1 http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=uname&sektion=1 [freebsd.org]

Re:Totally geeky

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather have the ability to search with sql like queries or some really nice regex style fuctionality.

Re:Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

My mobile phone also does not run linux. But it has two major advantage over phones that do: I already have it, and it's not made of unobtainium.

Re:Lynx

[BronsCon]

try typing addengine... replace your firefox google search with goosh :)

Re:Totally geeky

[khellendros1984]

Because that's what the user expects to have to do. The net's already confusing enough, with all the flash and different site design ideas. Why make it worse by making the textboxes react in novel ways? Then again, I guess it's Google. They could probably get away with it.

SQL interface

[hweimer]

Nice idea, but I like the SQL interface [cpan.org] better.

Re:Totally geeky

[Anonymous Coward]

Google itself acts like a shell in a lot of ways, with a calculator 5+3 [google.com] or yellow pages best buy near 02139 [google.com] or weather forecast weather 02139 [google.com] or stock quotes (now real time!) MSFT [google.com]

Unfortunately, goosh doesn't do any of those things:

[e-mail]:/web> 5+3
    1) Fifth Third Bancorp
Bank and savings and loan holding company with subsidiaries which perform commercial banking operations, savings bank operations, mortgage banking, ...
http://www.53.com/

[snip]

 

Re:Ironic...

[oracle128]

Oops, forgot to mention this. Even if you disagree with all of my points, here's the catch-all: we don't know for sure if the test has concluded. For all we know, everything including the fight with GLaDOS and surviving outside is part of the test. And, given that there will most likely be a Portal 2 eventually, it's reasonable to assume the possibility that Chell is forced into further testing.