In the now, there's still the command line
Yubnub is “a command line for the Web.” In the search box on their front page, you can enter “movies 94111” to get movie listings for San Francisco (or just “m 94111”), or “weather 10007” to get the weather in New York City (or just “w 10007”). Or “wp tesla” to look up Tesla in the Wikipedia; “imdb it happened one night” to look up a movie; “am john crowley” to look for John Crowley’s books on Amazon. And there are hundreds more. Here are one user’s picks, notable commands, most-used commands.
None of which is all that useful if you have to make a special trip to the site to issue your command. You’ll want to install it in your browser. I followed the “adventurous” advice:
Add YubNub to your Firefox address bar by typing about:config in the Location Bar then scrolling down the list and changing keyword.URL to http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command= You haven’t lived until you’ve turned the address bar into a full-fledged command line.
And if you do that, remember that Ctrl-l or Alt-D selects the existing URL, so you can just start typing, hit enter, and you’re there.
This site and that bit of Firefox configuration have changed the way I browse. I like command lines.
=v= Looks nice 'n' all, except it's inside one of those furshlugginer INPUT tag boxes. I like my command line to have TWENEX -- er, I mean, Emacs/bash/GNU readline -- editing capabilities.
(With due respect to Stephenson, before "the beginning" there was actually a much better command line!)
Posted by Jym on February 6 2006 21:15
Hi Zed - Glad you like it! You're more adventurous than me -- I've reverted to using the Firefox search plugin that Aaron Ransley wrote.
Posted by Jonathan Aquino on February 6 2006 23:33
What? Not using Conkeror, Jym? Then how about this?.
One of the things I like about the "adventurous" approach, Jonathan, is that I don't feel any need for a dedicated search box anymore -- I've removed it from my browser. It's all Yubnub all the time for me. Thanks for writing it!
Posted by Zed on February 7 2006 07:31
=v= Since I switched from news to gnus years ago, I suppose I could handle using Conkeror along with Konqueror.
Posted by Jym on February 7 2006 21:10