Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Desktop Launchers

One of the many great things about using the command line in a *nix environment is being able to access programs no matter what your current working directory is. Say for example I want to open a file to read, I just type 'less' then the file-name. I don't have to type the full directory path (/usr/bin/less) to get less to execute, this is because of the $PATH variable.

So when graphical desktop environments came along how did they handle finding programs? Well there seems to be two methods that are common among desktop environments, start menus and shortcuts. Neither of which are as fast as the command line because they both require mouse clicks to execute the program. (I know you can click the option button then arrow through the menus to find they application but the point is that it is slow.)

It takes me less then a second to type 4 or 5 letters. To move the mouse to the start menu, click, find the application in the list then click again to execute takes me 5 to 6 seconds and that's when I know where the application is at in the menu.


Solution: Launchers, a launcher is brought up with a keyboard shortcut usually (alt or command) + space bar. Then type the first few letters of the application, once you have found it hit enter and the application will open. Launches do much more then this but this is the most basic function of a launcher.

On my Mac I use Quicksilver, and on my Ubuntu Linux Desktop I use Gnome Do.

Launchers enable the best of both worlds, all the GUI goodness with the quick application access of the command line. Download one and try it out.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Google Operator Observation

I was writing a small Ruby program and with out thinking wrote:

count++

Which of course produces a : :syntax error !! when executed. Duh, Ruby does not have pre/post increment/decrement operators.

I wanted to find more information about this, so I started with Google, typed in ruby ++ and hit search.


That's cool the suggestion for 'Ruby ++' is 'Ruby increment'. So Google recognises programming operators?, not exactly. I could not get the same suggestions for other operators.

Other words like 'test ++' did not give a 'test increment' suggestion. Other programming languages did produce this like 'perl ++' but others didn't like 'java ++'.

I couldn't find alot of information on the 'See results for' feature. My guess is that a 'programming language name' and '++' and 'increment' must show up together in alot of webpages and Google is not doing some cool operator interpretation, ... sad.