AJAX Shells: Goosh!

A few months ago I ran across an AJAX interactive Ruby interpreter that really impressed me. It is an actual, working Ruby interpreter with an AJAX help system triggered by certain commands. If you type "help" followed by a number it will display the chapter's content in the area below the interpreter.

Today, Dustin Kanske from
Sprout showed me
Goosh, the Google shell. Goosh accepts a number of basic Unix-y commands (ls, cd, read, etc.) along with Google service related commands such as news, translate, blogs, feeds, etc. As you can see in the screenshot below, the output can contain rich interactive content that is incorporated into the shell's scrolling text area. This is a really exciting mashup of the concept of a shell and an AJAXy, Web 2.0 type interface.

Goosh has directory-like contexts such as web, news, etc. You can list the available contexts with the ls command. Unrecognized commands are treated as searches in the current context. If I am in the /news context and I type "lemurs", I will get an in-line listing of lemur related news. If I then type a number such as 2, goosh will take me to the second site listed in the search results. Goosh has a lot of potential. I'd love to see support for more advanced I/O commands and access to online storage. This would open up a world of possibilities. I'm really excited about this project and I sincerely hope Stephen continues to develop it into a serious tool. Great find Dustin! Ikayzo - Design • Build • Localize | Web • Desktop • Mobile