Lets developers write their own Enso commands.
Enso Developer Prototype
So you want to write your own Enso commands? We hear you.
Meet the Enso Developer Prototype. With it, you can finally write your own commands. While it’s still a prototype, it provides an API that lets you do all of the important things, like accessing the text selection, displaying transparent messages, and inserting text back into the current application.
“What language do I have to use?”, you ask. Any language you want to! We happen to think that Python is a great language—it’s what we use in Enso, after all—but if your favorite language supports XML-RPC, then it will work to create commands for the Enso Developer Prototype. Anything that you can make your computer do with language X, you can make Enso do too.
If you want help creating your own commands, or you’d like to share what you’ve learned, you should check out the Enso Wiki. There are some example commands, as well as some guides for how to build your own commands in a variety of languages.
Why is it called a prototype? Because we’re pretty sure that Enso’s got some big changes coming. The API that comes with the Enso Developer Prototype is likely to change, and isn’t as powerful as the one that we’re working on. But we wanted to get something out there for all of you who’ve been waiting to add your own commands.
Without further ado, download and enjoy!
Keeping Up-To-Date
Check back often to make sure that you are up-to-date, or Get updates via RSS. To update a beta product simply download the installer and install. Enso will take care of the rest.
Enso Developer Prototype v0.1.1
Why Beta?
Humanized is committed to world-class customer support. Even people who don't love Enso love our support. This product is in beta, which means we can't guarantee full support. But that doesn't mean we won't try.
This is incredibly powerful. I’m looking forward to see what the community will come up with. Thank you!
Cecil McGregor
November 14th, 2007 8:23 pm
Great talk at ParcPlace, Palo Alto last night. Will definitely investigate your product. I’m really glad to see new ideas hit the marketplace, it’s about time! ![]()
Jack Johnson
November 28th, 2007 12:34 pm
Like the Google command, I’d like to see you “cheat” and add a YubNub command to end-run a lot of the additional command development for the lightweight Web stuff.
Though, now that the Developer Prototype is out, I may beat you to the punch.
Jack Johnson
November 28th, 2007 12:35 pm
Oh, and you might as well do a nice product tie-in and add the Songza command while you’re there. ![]()
YubNub is actually part of the Enso Web Search Anywhere product ![]()
Johan Carlsson
December 12th, 2007 6:48 am
I’ve run in to a little problem with the Launcher.
First, I’m Swedish, and that means I use a and o with dots and ring over them (åäö).’
These characters are disabled by the Enso Launcher, making it less then i18n.
Worse, I’ve made a new command called web that launches the URL i type in a new tab of Mozilla.
Just a few lines of code and “bango” I got it working, almost, turns out the Enso Launcher has disabled me from writing forward slashes (/), making it impossible to type URLs in the launcher (I think the same is true for colons (:)?
So what I really need is a way to turn on characters for my custom commands.
I wan’t to be able to use the normal keystroks othervise writing would be weird, so it means I need to enable shift for my commands (or just enable the whole keyboard would work for me).
Why a web command? you might say.
Well I came from the fact that I often find myself watching podcasts on my PC, and they often refer to URLs in the podcast by printing them on the screen. At the moment no popular video-formats support hyperlinks (I wish they would) so I have to manually type the URL in my browser.
This is usually means switching between windows that overlap each other making the whole experience horrible.
With the web command I can write the URL without switching focused application.
Related to the problem above. If we can’t type in arbitrary strings as command parameters for now. Could You at least support outputting unicode in the massages?
Ok, that’s a dummy request, but if someone have skills and can quickly developp a Lorem Ipsum insert command, it’ll be great ![]()
Creating a Delicious set of commands
* Access to your account
* Search on your account tag1+tag2
* Search on public tags
Hi all, GREAT tool. I’ve been using Enso for a few months now and already after a few days I was like “HOW did I ever use my computer before”
Anyway, there IS one feature that is definitely NOT for everyone, but may have useful extensions later on. Basically, it would be as easy and simple as “upper case” and “lower case” commands are.
The feature is the following: There is a lot of websites and texts in Serbian BUT using Latin letters. This was fine in the beginning when people didn’t know about UTF-8 and so on. But today there is really no reason that Serbian is not written in Cyrillic letters. (which is the Serbian alphabet)
Thus, I would LOVE to be able to select some Serbian text written using Latin letters and call an Enso command: “toserbiancyrillic” and have it converted into Cyrillic letters! (”toserbianlatin” would reverse it)
I will TRY to do this using Java but I don’t feel very comfortable and confident. So, if ANYONE who has made extensions to Enso would like to help me with this I would REALLY appreciate it!!!
The underlying mechanism is a simple 1-1 mapping, for example converting ž into ж and so on! The easy part is that Serbian language has NO SPELLING! So it would literally be a 1-1 mapping!!! (see my name for an example)
THANKS!
Per Vognsen
May 18th, 2008 4:13 am
This is really a suggestion for Enso Launcher, but I didn’t see a feedback form or email address there, so I’ll put it here–also, what I’m suggesting should be implementable as an extension.
Anyway, while I love the idea of using the current text selection as the universal locus for input and output, it sometimes it isn’t what you want. The calculate command is a good example; often I just want to do some quick arithmetic and see the result right there. How about having all these commands optionally take their input from the command line (grab everything following the command itself)? So if you just write ‘calculate’ it’ll read the input from the text selection and also write the result there. But if you write ‘calculate 1+2+3′ it’ll take ‘1+2+3′ as the input and print the result through Enso’s overlay. There is a non-obvious choice in how that’s done; does the overlay persist for a fixed, user-configurable time and then disappear, or does it work modally by persisting until the user presses a key?
Is there an Enso standard for the “please wait” message that should be displayed if a command will take longer than 250ms to complete?
Should all Enso commands literally say “Please wait.” so that all commands are consistent with each other?
Or should commands give a descriptive command-specific message, such as “Downloading MP3 file…” or “Searching for books about ‘Python’…” ?
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Damoon Rashidi
June 28th, 2008 6:20 am
I’d love to see a word calculator plug-in for enso. Basically something that, in addition to word count, took the highlighted text and returned statistics on average word length, number of letters, most common letter, number of a’s,b’s,c’s etc.
While writing this I found the ruby API so I might as well write it myself.
zinzila
July 17th, 2008 8:44 am
It’s so disappointing it doesn’t have support to other languages. It even doesn’t let you input local symbols
although the idea is great!
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