Member-only story
Awesome Linux CLI Tools for Building Instant GUI Apps and Tools
These amazing CLI tools (xclip, xdg-open, zenity...) can be used with any programming language
Sometimes, we suddenly notice awesome application ideas that will help everyone during the day to day activities with computers. A few months back, I was fixing some compilation issues of a project which was written in C++. I had to search several error messages on Google to find solutions for some tricky compile errors. Thereafter, I thought to build a tool to make these kinds of searches easy. What I did was that I created a small program to listen to a specific key combination, whenever the key combination has happened, the particular program will open Google via Chrome browser with the query that was set according to what text was selected earlier.
The key requirement for the specific program was to get the currently selected text. I was writing some Python code and noticed that there was no direct native API to do such a thing. Therefore, I used xclip which sets or gets data from/to the clipboard for extracting currently selected text. This tool will work with any application that is…
