Nutshell + Canny Integrations

Nutshell, for those who don't know, is a shell which can be used instead of the standard command line to run scripts. It has a powerful scripting system and a graphical interface to help you write your scripts and test them. It also contains the most popular Linux commands in its file system.

Canny is a new desktop environment based on Gnome, which aims to provide a simple and fast graphical interface to interact with your system.

In this article I will compare the two systems and show how they can work together to give you an integrated Nutshell/Canny environment.

Integration of Nutshell and Canny

A good thing about Nutshell is that it has a lot of built-in commands which can be accessed by typing their name in the command line (as opposed to typing the full path to the executable. For example, to run the XMMS player, I would type xmms . To open a terminal window, I would type gnome-terminal . This is a very convenient feature, as it saves time and effort for repetitive tasks. However, there are many more commands I would like to have included in Nutshell, such as gimp , webbrowser , and gaim . These applications are not included in Nutshell because they are not bash scripts, but they might as well be. They are more accessible through the GUI than through the command line anyway! So, what if we could include these applications through Nutshell's scripting system? Then, we could access them with one word instead of typing their full path! This is where Canny comes in. Canny's main advantage is that it allows you to create desktop icons which actually run bash scripts. For example, I could make an icon on my desktop called "gimp", and when I click on it, it would run a script which launches gimp. This mechanism could be used to create an "Application Bar", allowing me to access all my frequently used applications through one icon. The script could then read some configuration files containing information about each application (arguments, etc.. and set up everything automatically. How convenient!

An "Application Bar" could also be created in Nutshell, using similar techniques. In fact, I have already started working on such an Application Bar for Nutshell, but it currently only works under Gnome. The problem with it is that Nutshell and Gnome do not use the same configuration files (they have different formats. so the script cannot easily read both config files at once. A spution might be found by writing a script which understands both formats, or by creating a generic configuration file format into which both formats are converted before being read by the script. I am not very familiar with XML, so I do not know if either of these sputions is feasible. However, I am sure that it is possible to integrate Nutshell and Canny in this way; we just need to take the time to get it right. If anyone knows of any other ways to integrate Nutshell and Canny into one application bar program, do tell! My email address is michael dot wong craig at edu dot uk (it's best to replace the spaces in that address with underscores.

Benefits of Integration of Nutshell and Canny

As I mentioned above, integration of Nutshell and Canny would allow us to create an application bar which runs bash scripts. This would allow us to access Nutshell applications without having to use their full path (which may or may not be long enough), and it would also allow us to access Canny applications without having to install them on our disk (which may be impossible if they are proprietary. Also, since Canny includes many small command line utilities (like rsync , zcat , etc.), we can save even more time by running them directly from our application bar instead of opening a terminal window and typing their full path!

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