James Selvakumar’s Blog

February 11, 2009

Goosh – A fantastic front-end to Google services

Filed under: opensource, tools — James @ 3:56 pm

I recently came across a nice little tool called “goosh” or “The unofficial Google Shell”. It resembles a linux shell (or terminal) and provides a “command line interface” on the web for many google services. This means that you can just open and read your mails very fast by typing just 2 commands: “login” and then “gmail”. That’s it, your mails are loaded damn fast and this is what you might want if you are in a hurry!

And goosh provides some cool facilities like searching wikipedia, news, rss feeds, blogs etc etc with simple to use (and remember) commands. Let’s see some of goosh’s firepower in action.

This is what you might see when you load goosh initially.

Now let’s read some news quickly. Just enter “news <your favourite news topic>” in goosh.

Ok. Now let’s search for some information from wikipedia using the command “wiki <your search term>”.

Searching images is also as easy as typing “images <your search term>”.

You can also search for a specific topic from a particular website using the command “site <site-name> <your search term>”. This is what goosh returned when I searched for the term “javafx” from the site “java.sun.com”.

Reading rss feeds is as simple as issuing the command “read <site-name>”. Believe me!

It’s very easy to login into gmail and read your mails.

You can list the commands available by simply typing “ls” as you would do in your linux terminal.

To get help on using these commands, type “help <command-name>”.

Goosh is really an amazing tool which makes me admire the power of “command line”. And I’m even more surprised by the fact that this excellent piece of innovation did not come from Google but from a single developer called Stefan Grothkopp.

10 Comments »

  1. amazing indeed :-)
    On top of my bookmarks list !

    Comment by Olikaf — February 13, 2009 @ 11:03 am | Reply

  2. command line on the web? why?

    Comment by Anil — February 13, 2009 @ 1:56 pm | Reply

    • it’s like jazz. If you have to ask, you can’t understand.

      Comment by Mario — November 5, 2009 @ 5:00 pm | Reply

  3. This has to be the geekiest web tools I’ve seen. So cool.

    Comment by Carlos — February 13, 2009 @ 3:36 pm | Reply

  4. Thanks for sharing this fantastic tool,I love it.

    Comment by Muhammad Samir — February 13, 2009 @ 5:07 pm | Reply

  5. Very nice. Bookmarked. Thanks. :D

    I wanna ask you a question:
    The “open (o)” command is not working for me in Firefox. I can use “go (g)” command for opening a web page in the same window. However, for opening a search result in the new window by “open (o)”, it is not working. Am i doing something wrong or is this feature not working in FF?

    Comment by Abdullah Cetin CAVDAR — February 14, 2009 @ 8:42 am | Reply

    • Hi Abdullah,
      You can try this:
      Type “open 1 2″ to open the first 2 search results (which u previously did) in new tabs in firefox. Ensure that your firefox is not blocking popups from goosh.

      Comment by James — February 16, 2009 @ 3:11 am | Reply

  6. jamesselvakumar.wordpress.com – great domain name for blog like this)))
    ————————
    my blog: http://potet.ru/

    Comment by phardivanar — February 17, 2009 @ 1:58 pm | Reply

  7. Surfraw provides a number of links into google from a real shell.

    surfraw – a fast unix command line interface to WWW services

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfraw

    Comment by joe — February 19, 2009 @ 3:32 am | Reply

  8. acmsaxhtazik

    Comment by xogeoeozqwut — October 5, 2009 @ 8:49 pm | Reply


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