Re: OT: automation

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 10:39:52AM +0100, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 5. November 2009 14:24:55 schrieb
> olafBuddenhagen@gmx.net:

> > > alt-F2 -> gg:google search -> enter -> konqueror starts the
> > > search.
> > 
> > It's stupid to have such a feature *within* some program. Such stuff
> > should be handled globally. See my recent rant:
> > 
> >    http://tri-ceps.blogspot.com/2009/06/one-shell-to-rule-them-all.html
> > 
> > (IMHO one of my best so far :-) )
> 
> Sounds like KDE + shell integration could be a first step for you... 

I don't think KDE does any better than GNOME in this regard; nor does
any other desktop environment I know about... And thus I'm not using
any.

I'm not sure whether this was clear enough in the article: the "shell"
I'm talking about there is not actually the traditional UNIX shell. Most
programs have features that can't be properly integreated into a
commandline-only shell. I'm more thinking in the direction of GUI shells
like Nautilus.

("Shell" as a general term refers to a part of a program that handles
the user interaction -- every traditional application has an own shell.
And this is precisely what I propose to change.)

> > It's just stupid that with the fat full-featured browsers, opening a
> > new page from the shell is not just as easy as starting the browser
> > in the default way.
> 
> You mean something like this? 
> 
>       kfmclient newTab "http://1w6.org";

Sounds like it might be more or less right.

My point is that I shouldn't need to learn such an obscure command. I
should be able just to do "firefox http://1w6.org"; -- regardless whether
there is a Firefox already running or not.

Actually this seems to work nowadays with firefox :-) I seem to remember
that it didn't in the past...

The only remaining inconsistency is that it exits immediately when there
was a firefox already running, while the first instance blocks... But
that's not much of a problem -- I can just run it in the background in
either case.

>       kfmclient newTab gg:1w6
> 
> (if you have gg: as shortcut for "search in google", then this
> searches google for "1w6"). 
> 
> you could make this more convenient for shell users with the alias 
> 
> alias kon='kfmclient newTab'
> 
> Now you could just use "kon gg:1w6" to search for 1w6. 

Why would I want to use two levels of aliases? I'd simply define:

   go() { firefox google.com/search?q="$*"; }

There are other reasons though why I'll stay with the netrik-based
variant I mentioned before for now :-)

-antrik-