Ran across Joost de Valk’s Quix, a bookmarklet that pops up a dialog box and then provides a bevy of commands that work within the context of the current browser page. Plus it’s extensible with your own commands.
Quix is an extensible bookmarklet, that allows you to easily access all your bookmarks and bookmarklets, across all your browsers, while maintaining them in only one spot. All you have to do is remember the shortcut for the bookmarklet, so, basically, it’s like a command line for your browser
Quix reminds me of the currently napping Mozilla Ubiquity experiment, which put the command line right in the browser’s URL bar. If I wasn’t so into LaunchBar as my command launcher, I’d probably really dig into one of these command line in a browser extensions. While I’m sure Quix and Ubiquity are good for running macro style one-liners, I’d be interested to see what a real browser shell language looked like. Sort of how Shivers describes the UNIX shell languages.
Unix shells, such as sh or csh, provide two things at once: an interactive command language and a programming language. Let us focus on the latter function: the writing of “shell scripts” — interpreted programs that perform small tasks or assemble a collection of Unix tools into a single application.
Unix shells are real programming languages. They have variables, if/then conditionals, and loops. But they are terrible programming languages. The data structures typically consist only of integers and vectors of strings. The facilities for procedural abstraction are non-existent to minimal. The lexical and syntactic structures are multi-phased, unprincipled, and baroque.
Scheme for driving a browser. Hmmmm. Now there’s a language design I’d like to see.
Via MetaFilter