The Uncarved Block

Ubiquity was an amazing mozilla addon which gives users a command-line interface within the browser which you can use to do various things. Users can easily write their own commands in javascript and share them via the web. In that spirit, I've written my first ubiquity command, which searches hoogle, the haskell type-aware search engine.

CmdUtils.makeSearchCommand({
    homepage: "http://www.uncarved.com/",
    author: { name: "Sean Hunter"},
    license: "MPL",
    name: "hoogle-search",
    url: "http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle={QUERY}",
    icon: "http://www.haskell.org/favicon.ico",
    description: "Searches haskell.org for functions matching by name or type sign
    ature.",
});

As you can see, it's virtually all meta-data and that's because there are a bunch of functions around search that know how to do everything you need to do. However, you can write more sophisticated commands that manipulate the browser, the web page you're on, have little built-in previews etc. All very nifty.

When you have the above, you can simply invoke ubiquity and say "hoogle-search Ord a => a -> a" or whatever and it will find you functions matching that type signature. I'll share this command (and any others I write) at www.uncarved.com using the subscription mechanism they recommend.

I was feeling rather proud of the above, however I saw this morning that if you go on a page with a search box, select it and invoke ubiquity and type "create-new-search-command" it writes something very much like the above for you.

Note: Ubiquity functionality has been superceded by the search bar itself.