idea for new feature: ubiquity in gnome? (request for brainstorm)

[Zhang Weiwu]

I am not sure how many used ubiquity, the Firefox plugin, I find it
highly innovative and useful. How about making it available in gnome?

In short, we make gnome work in this way:

User can do a mouse selection anywhere on a gnome desktop, e.g.
addressbar, email composing window, openoffice writer or calculator,
tomboy notes etc. When something is selected, the user can press a
special key (I recommend the "menu key" sitting adjacent to right Ctrl),
a bubble pops up asking user what he wants to do with the selection. He can:

    * Type "wiki" and enter to see wikipedia article about the selected word
    * Type "google trans en" and enter to see selected text translated
      to English using google translate. While this is done, the
      translated text is also pre-selected for pasting.
    * Type "whois" and enter to launch a GUI application return whois
      result of selected IP address or domain name;
    * Type "man" to launch a manual page browser for selected command;
    * Type "calc" to calculate selected math expression (or even "plot
      it" to get output from gnuplot)
    * Type "dic" to get the translation.
    * ....

This change user behavior from "launch application, use it to process
information" to "pick information, and choose how to process it", which
is closer to nature user action, because in most cases a nature user
think of information first instead of tools first.

Other ideas:

   1. The tool can be written in a framework that "wiki", "whois",
      "man", "calc" and "dic" are scriptable plugins, and everyone can
      contribute plugin or just download them from the Internet the same
      way they download themes (with security consideration of course);
   2. Each "plugin" can have their regular expression matching selected
      text. e.g. if you select an ip address, the tool can even suggest
      to use 'whois' extension or just activate 'whois' extension if
      that was configured the default action for
      [0-9]{1,3}[.][0-9]{1,3}[.][0-9]{1,3}[.][0-9]{1,3}
   3. Even if default action activates one extension, user can still
      type something to get other extensions activated. This allow a
      Chinese user configure "English dictionary" as default extension,
      while any time a word is selected and "menu" key is pressed, the
      word is put to Chinese and the bubble wait for further commands.
   4. Allow bubbles without any selection (could be fortune(1) message).
   5. Allow bubbles when selecting a file (multiple ways to open the
      file or even type a command to process the file).
   6. Allow typing any console command and the selected text will be
      used as last parameter (e.g. user type "ping") or piped in as
      stdin (e.g. user type "sort <"). After execution, stdout is shown
      in the bubble and also pre-selected for pasting. This makes it
      easy to pick a price table in an email and instantly get output of
      products less than 50 USD by typing an one-line awk script. This
      idea would bring +100 extension in one shot and make commandline
      elites really fall in love with gnome.
   7. extensions can be written to use local database, e.g.
      /usr/share/dic which is available by default in FreeBSD, for
      English words. And better be local, because unlike Firefox, gnome
      is expected to work offline.
   8. Let's name it either for being ubiquity in the universe.


What do you think?

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[Zhang Weiwu]

Zhang Weiwu wrote:
>    6. Allow typing any console command and the selected text will be
>       used as last parameter (e.g. user type "ping") or piped in as
>       stdin (e.g. user type "sort <"). After execution, stdout is shown
>       in the bubble and also pre-selected for pasting. This makes it
>       easy to pick a price table in an email and instantly get output of
>       products less than 50 USD by typing an one-line awk script. This
>       idea would bring +100 extensions in one shot and make commandline
>       elites really fall in love with gnome.
I can think of a few useful trick of this:

    * In a text-only (no BB-code) forum, select a forum post, "menu
      key", type "fold < | sed 's/^/< /'" to get quoted message to do
      in-line reply.
    * Seeing a command "bc", select it, "menu key", type "man -t | lp "
      would cause it run "man -t bc | lp".
    * Seeing a link to the source code package, select it, "menu key",
      type "curl < | tar -C ~/code/ jxvf -" and wait for the bubble to
      finish. When it does, the source code is unpacked at the right place.
    * Select text and run "aspell", instantly turn gnome to spell-check
      capable platform. However this require interactiveness in the
      bubble which is not sure if doable.
    * Add word count feature to any text by selecting the whole article
      and do "wc <";
    * Select a whole web page and do "a2ps <" to get clean text-only
      print out;


In general there could be a lot of uses.
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