http://depth-first.com/articles/2007/03/27/rethinking-the-command-line-for-chemistry en-us 40 Walking the Web of Chemical Informatics <p><center><img src="http://depth-first.com/demo/20070327/yubnub.png" align="center"></img></center> <br /><br /> A <a href="http://depth-first.com/articles/2007/03/15/do-you-use-the-command-line">recent article</a> discussed the renaissance of the command line. Particularly on the Web, command line interfaces have become so advanced, that most of us don't even realize we're using them. Consider the Google search box, which is nothing more than one of the most powerful command line interfaces ever developed.</p> <p>A service called <a href="http://yubnub.org/">YubNub</a> takes this idea one step further. YubNub is a meta command line interface for the Web. The following YubNub command will do a <a href="http://flickr.com">Flickr</a> search for benzene.</p> <p><center><img src="http://depth-first.com/demo/20070327/ducatisearch.png"></img></center></p> <p>If this were all YubNub did, it would be merely interesting. What makes YubNub remarkable is that you can create your own commands that other people can use. I recently added the "ginchi" command to query Google for an InChI. Now you can try it out:</p> <p><center><img src="http://depth-first.com/demo/20070327/benzenesearch1.png"></img></center></p> <p>By itself this isn't particularly useful because you can just go to Google and query the InChI directly. However, it's not too hard to imagine several commands like <tt>ginchi</tt> that could be added. Some would use Google, others would use other services. How about something that searches Mitch Garcia's <a href="http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/chemical-pipe-works.html">chemistry journal Yahoo pipe</a>? It would be very convenient to have all of those commands accessible from the same Web page.</p> <p>Command line interfaces can be phenomenally useful for both beginning and advanced users. The hardest part to get right is not what the user sees as they type, but what happens after they hit the enter key.</p> <p><a href="http://depth-first.com/articles/tag/linenotation">Line notations</a> are the perfect match for command line interfaces. The widespread use of SMILES and the precision of InChI offer many possibilities for innovative chemistry Web services.</p> Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:30:00 +0000 urn:uuid:8e30edda-82a2-4800-95cf-0c34b669a056 Rich Apodaca http://depth-first.com/articles/2007/03/27/rethinking-the-command-line-for-chemistry Tools commandline linenotation yubnub web20 ginchi <p>Firefox has had this feature for some time now. You can right-click on a search box and choose "Add a keyword for this search". Then you can choose a keyword for that search and then onwards you can type the keyword followed by the search item in the address bar to search that particular website. E.g., if you chose g as your keyword for google, you can type "g benzene" to search google for benzene.</p> Tue, 27 Mar 2007 14:29:45 +0000 urn:uuid:9432fbba-759a-4c67-9095-f9f8c9429bd2 http://depth-first.com/articles/2007/03/27/rethinking-the-command-line-for-chemistry#comment-7