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goosh, the Unofficial Google Shell

Posted by kdawson on from the land-a-gooshen dept.

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."

17 of 310 comments (clear)

  1. Lynx by FST · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

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    1. Re:Lynx by grizdog · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Lynx by BronsCon · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

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      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  2. source code says by LordMyren · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

  3. Difference? by Deltaspectre · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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)

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    My UID is prime... is yours?
    1. Re:Difference? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

  4. Shells by ucblockhead · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

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  5. Re:Totally geeky by vanyel · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  6. Check out JavaScript Shell... by Anik315 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You can actually take something like JavaScript Shell 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 )

  7. Browser Graphical Commandline by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 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.

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  8. according to urban dictionary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

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

  9. It's running FreeBSD by wikes82 · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

  10. Re:Totally geeky by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

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

  11. Re:Totally geeky by khellendros1984 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

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  12. SQL interface by hweimer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Nice idea, but I like the SQL interface better.

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    OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
  13. Re:Totally geeky by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

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

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

    guest@goosh.org:/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]

  14. Re:Ironic... by oracle128 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.