[capitainenemo]

I was kinda wondering that myself. There's so many terminal based apps to keep track of, I've gotten into the habit of trying to know a core set fairly well (like bash,awk,sed,grep -P etc). For this sort of thing I have a dozen tabs open in w3m already.

  $ alias wiki='f(){ w3m -F "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=${1}&title=Special:Search&ns0=1"; unset -f f; }; f'
  $ wiki pandas

This seemed to work well for me.

A tab to the wikipedia search page bookmarked would work well too and could be used in existing w3m/lynx session.

[capitainenemo]

Oh, BTW, this sort of thing works well with any sort of site that degrades gracefully/is not pure JS.

  $ alias crate='f(){ w3m -F "https://lib.rs/search?q=${1}"; unset -f f; }; f'
  $ crate rocket

(lib.rs is a crate index using rust as the server instead of javascript, and has advantage of working well with terminal browsers)

[SoftTalker]

This is the Unix way. You already have the tools and utilities you need, just pipeline them together and make an alias if it’s something you need frequently.

[Bayes7]

hey, off topic but can you explain or link a post which explains what the benefits of the alias -> function definition are over just defining the function directly? Thanks!

[prmoustache]

I am puzzled as well, why not define the function and call it wiki?

[capitainenemo]

I'm just used to keeping all my aliases together for easy location with alias command and I like having ones with arguments with the others.

Aside from that, no benefit really that I can think of.

So yes, to be clear to anyone else you can just put:

  wiki(){ w3m -F "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=${1}&title=Special:Search&ns0=1"; }

in your .bashrc - and if you're me you just forget how you defined it and you have to cat it every once in a while :)

Oh, and you might be entertained by this silly alias adapted from an IOCC entry...

  $ cstdin
  printf("Hello World\n");
  Hello World

  alias cstdin='gcc -pedantic -ansi -Wall -o ~/.stdin ~/.stdin.c -lm && ~/.stdin'


  $ cat ~/.stdin.cc
  #include <stdio.h>
  <snip many headers>
  int main(int argc, char **argv)
  {
  #include </dev/tty>
  return 0;
  }

I'm sure it would also make way more sense as a dedicated script. I have a C++ one in there too.

[Bayes7]

ah I see, cool thanks!