Thursday 19 February 2009

the GUI, CLI style

For the more tech-literate users, the Linux command-line interface is the best productivity boost one can get. Literally anything can be done with a few magical commands, and all without having to move this pesky mouse. Typing a command like 'locate' is much faster than launching whatever desktop search application you use, and you can go on to doing something with the found file in the same step using a pipe.

But the GUI has its uses. For one, it looks a lot snazzier. Second, any kind of data visualization is much better done in graphical mode (graphs, any kind of WYSIWYG editors including office applications). Still, it would be nice to be able to use the keyboard, which is a much more efficient input mechanism than the mouse (albeit with a steeper learning curve).

A recent project has emerged which attempt to bring the CLI to the GUI: Ubiquity. Ubiquity is a Firefox plug-in, which adds a natural language-like command line to the browser. For example, one can select some text, press CTRL-K (the shortcut to bring up Ubiquity), type "translate this to english," and press enter. This runs the selected text through Google's translator, and replaces your selection with the result. There is much more that can be done with this plug-in. I suggest you check out the video I linked above.

Another CLI-like interface, though much more limited, is Gnome Do (KDE users should check out the KDE equivalent, KRunner). It allows you to basically do away with the Gnome menu. You can open files with it, run applications, extract or create archives, tweet, etc. If you have the right plug-ins, there is almost nothing that cannot be done. Granted, the actual command line is still far more powerful. But Gnome Do can allow you to be much more productive, if you take the time to set it up and learn it.

Ubuntu has Gnome Do packages in its repositories, but they are unfortunately far out of date. Gnome Do has its own repo's, but they, too, lag a release behind. the only feasible option to get a recent release is to compile from source. luckily, Gnome Do's wiki provides good instructions, and compiling is fairly straightforward if you have gone through the process before. There is one caveat if you're running an older Ubuntu release: mono, one of the dependencies, is out of date. You can compile the latest version of mono yourself, or you could fall back to the latest official Gnome Do release:
bzr checkout -rtag:0.8.0 gnome-do-0.8.0 gnome-do
and install mono 1.9.1 from the badgerports repo. This will allow you to use Gnome Do's basic functionality. Building the plug-ins from source was somewhat more difficult. Dependency hell ensued, and I failed to build the plugins from source. I was finally able to get the plugins by downloading the gnome-plugins-0.8.0 deb for intrepid, manualy extracting the plugin files with the archive manager, and placing them in /usr/share/gnome-do/plugins. Not very amenable to upgrades, but working nonetheless. When you do get the package working, the functionality is pretty sweet.

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