rant is where the heart is

diaryland: sirilyan.diaryland.com: entry for 2005-02-18 (11:02)
In which our plucky young hero notes that also, his iPod would just work if he switched.

(Warning: I seem to have only two modes these days, Canadian-political ranting and Unix-technical ranting. You are now experiencing the second of the two modes.)

If Unix is so scriptable, how come I can't do this?

Now, I'm not trying to be difficult here (at least, not a lot), but for all that I love GNOME and have been doing my best to contribute to it, I honestly have no idea if the simple dialog box that Gruber has created is even possible in my environment, let alone knowable.

I'll constrain myself to operating entirely within the GNOME environment, and only pick on tools written specifically for GNOME and packaged in the default GNOME distribution. (This already puts Apple another hundred points up, score-wise, since BBEdit isn't an Apple product and doesn't come preinstalled on OS X.) What I want to know is this:

I want to cause cause gedit to have a new menu option called Get URLs, whose invokation makes a popup window appear. In that window is a list of all the URLs currently being displayed in any running Epiphany process, and by picking one and clicking Insert it's pasted at the current caret into the top-level gedit document.

Now, I have some conditions that I will impose, because I don't just want this to be possible, I want it to approach the Apple way in accessibility and ease of use for the end user. So, I will now warn you that if you send me a suggestion, I will perform the following actions before trying it out:

# mv /usr/bin/gcc /usr/bin/no_compilers_allowed
# mv /usr/bin/make /usr/bin/or_makefiles_either
# exit
$ echo "I won't be root while I do it either"

(Why am I removing gcc and make? The BBEdit/Safari solution is written in a scripting language, and I want to do the exact same damn thing on my own desktop. As such, I don't particularly care if it is possible to cause the user-interface effect I want in GNOME using C and plugin architectures. I'm interested in competitive, not parallel.)

So, Lazyweb... any help?

sirilyan.diaryland.com | sirilyan dotcom
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