Goosh – A fantastic front-end to Google services

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.