Bash and Dash

I know, “bash and dash” sounds like a sadistic game for frat boys. But it rhymed and was so apropos.

Here’s a quick tip for Dash users. If you want to put Dash’s powerful browsing and search features to use from the command line, a couple quick shell aliases will make life that much more fun.

First an easy script to open any arguments as a search in Dash. (Thanks to kavu for the note about $* vs. $@).

# Open argument in Dash
function dash() {
	open "dash://$*"
}

With that combination, you can just type dash ruby:FileUtils cp_r on the command line and have Dash open your Ruby docset, locate the FileUtils class, and search the page for cp_r. Anything that works in the Dash search field works in a url.

One last quickie… I love being able to open man pages in Dash, search them, bookmark them, and have them float while I try things out in a Terminal window. Assuming you have the man page docset enabled (and your shortcut is man:), you can make a quick shortcut that will let you do dman sort and pop open the sort man page.

function dman() {
	open "dash://man:$*"
}

If you were so inclined, you could name it man and just have it replace the built-in man command, but that seems drastic. Note that you can start searches immediately from the command line as well: dman find -atime.

URL schemes are so much fun.