Humanized Enso – Command line meets GUI

Humanized Enso

Last night as I was perusing the series of tubes I went to one of the sites I frequent, Mozilla Labs. I was looking for some design inspiration for Crainbandy, some inspiration, and I wanted to mix it with a little bit of bad ass. I was reading through the archives and that’s when I found Enso. The post I found Enso from was about The Graphical Keyboard User Interface. Allow me to link it up. It’s a good read, go read it. Would you seriously go read it already? Alright. Tappin’ out. Wait, one last thing. I’ve used this program for less than 24 hours, and I promise you I will never have a PC again without Enso on it.

Dominantly the article covers a lot of good stuff, but Enso was what gave me the chubby, and the idea that command line is lightyears quicker than a GUI. Combine them both, and you have Enso. Humanized (creators of Enso) have a similar article that’s also worth reading. I’m not a command line fan boy, but I am definitely an advocate for both a GUI and a command line esque functionality that is encompassed in a no-brainer type execution structure. (COUGH) Enso.

Side note

I am addicted to Enso after just a day of use, but Mozilla Labs has an extremely good idea ironically called Ubiquity. Ubiquity is going exactly in the same direction as Enso, it’s just geared much more towards connecting the series of tubes.

Here’s a video of Ubiquity in action

What is Enso?


Excerpt from Humanized Enso site
Having to change programs to perform simple tasks—for example, making a quick calculation, or looking up a definition—breaks your concentration, takes you away from the task at hand, and wastes your valuable time. Enso lets you do common computing tasks easier and faster than ever before. You get a huge productivity boost and a simpler digital life. And now that Enso is free, it won’t cost you a penny.

Turning Caps Lock into a command key might sound strange at first — no other software works that way, does it? — but our philosophy is that interfaces can’t hope to be better than what you’re used to unless they’re different from what you’re used to. You’ll find that Enso is different in a lot of other ways, too. Give the Caps Lock method a try. If you don’t like it, you can of course configure Enso to be activated in the way you prefer

How does Enso work?

(Warning: Nutshell.)

  • Install it on your PC and fire up Enso Launcher
  • Press and hold “CAPS LOCK” to enable the Enso prompt
  • If all else fails hold down CAPS LOCK and type “help”

It’s that easy, let me give you some examples.

Take this in its for instance

Some common tasks that Enso makes blazing fast. One neat thing about Enso is that it has a dictionary index that it searches through for each keystroke you type in the prompt. If you type “o” it would show you all the commands that have the letter “o” in them. You can type “help” at any time to visit the help page that’s hosted on your machine. If that’s not enough you can also view the command list by typing “command list”

The coolest thing about all of this is, you type a small portion of the command you want to run, and Enso finds the most suitable. To execute that command you simply release the CAPS LOCK key. If you messed up and didn’t input what you wanted, simply slam all your fingers into your keyboard at once (shit tons of fun) and watch Enso quickly run out of options resulting in a beautiful notice of “Command not found”

Note

All of these examples assume I’m holding down CAPS LOCK before I type the command.

  • Opening Firefox
    Long version: open mozilla firefox
    Short version: open fir
  • Opening iTunes
    Long version: open itunes
    Short version: open it
  • Going to a window
    go itunes
    go skype
  • Minimize/Maximize/Close window manipulation
    close
    maximize
    minimize

Here’s some screenshots of Enso, and here’s a video of it in action

Developers and Beta

Now we’re getting to the cool part. Enso has created extensions to it’s framework allowing you to:

  • Enso Media Remote Control – A remote-control for your music: Play, pause, and skip tracks in your favorite music player from any application.
  • Enso Words – Spell check, and word definitions on the fly.
  • Enso Developer Prototype – Lets developers write their own Enso commands. (omfg)

I’m only listing half of the extensions they have available. If you sit infront of a computer the majority of your day, do yourself a favor. There’s a lot in this article I didn’t cover for longevity’s sake, and yours. They have done an outstanding job of making it easy to use, and understand. Just start using it and within hours you know what you’re doing. Stay tuned though, I will be writing tutorials for Enso and Ubiquity developers soon.

Once you install Enso, you won’t ever uninstall it.

Download it

You don’t even know what you’re missing.
Bryan

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