Five Really Handy Google Command Line Tricks
Quickly Add Any Event to Google Calendar with Plain Language
You can quickly add any event to your Google calendar with GoogleCL with one command and plain language. For example, if I were to simply type:google calendar add "Dinner tomorrow at 8pm with Ellen at Figaro"
...and hit Enter, GoogleCL will create the event in Calendar and figure out what I meant about the when and where. It's the same Quick Add feature available on the Google Calendar site, but you don't have to fire up your web browser and wait for Calendar to load to use it. You can enter the who, what, where, and when, and Google Calendar will figure out the rest.
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10:32 pm Mon
Jun 21, 2010
Powerful and cool ways to use Google Command Line
Lifehacker's Adam Pash has five really sweet little tips for getting the most out of Google new Command Line tool, which allows you to manage a wide variety of Google services from the command line.
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Nerd: “Ellen, have dinner with me.”
Ellen: “What? No way.”
Nerd: sudo google calendar add “Dinner tomorrow at 8pm with Ellen at Figaro”
Ellen: “Okay, see you at 8.”
You can enter the who, what, where, and when, and Google Calendar will figure out the rest.
The cool thing about this (and I haven’t used it yet, so it is probably even cooler), as with virtually all CL interfaces, is that it makes a web service scriptable – meaning you can write your own local widgets which combine pieces of things in new ways.
Exactly. I think Google has just performed another coup without people realizing it. They’re geniuses. Whether evil or garden variety remains to be seen, but this is another incredibly powerful tool in their arsenal of geek persuasion.
Does the command line binary auto update in the background without your knowledge or consent?
Re: the calendar command…I can almost feel the swift and welcome return of my favorite personal assistant, iwantsandy.com.
Can someone explain this as if they were explaining it to a small child? I have no idea what this does, but I get the feeling it is cool as hell and I feel like I SHOULD know….
@Anon Compare this to MS Word or Excel macros. Rather than moving the mouse, clicking on a box, and editing something millions of times, you can start the macro and let it do that repetitive task over and over again.
Pointing and clicking is OK for small tasks that you don’t have to do many times in a row, but it’s not good for doing the same thing over and over again for hours at a time. Why should you? The point of computers is to avoid repetitive work.
The point of Google doing this with the command line is that there are already many existing tools in that environment that can help you construct “macros” to do interesting, complicated tasks. The command line was designed specifically for combining the results of different tasks.
lol @ #1
Oh good, because Thor knows there’s nothing more irritating than having to point/click (or swipe/tap) a full-color GUI with comprehensible, metaphorical controls that elegantly expose all necessary functions.
I’d much rather sit at a keyboard and try to remember whatthehell to type. Man pages get me horny. I am just so pleased that Google has taken us all the way back to 1969.
The command line is just one of many possible interfaces. It’s there, but you don’t have to use it, any more than you have to start applications on a Mac by using “open” from the Terminal.