The command line gives even the geekiest developers of all a run for their money. Mastering all of those cryptic commands is a real tough job and Jeff Pickhardt might have just found a solution for all those long hours spent Googling the right command. Betty, is a personal assistant for the command line like how Google Now, Siri and Cortana are voice recognizing PA’s. Its a tool that translates plain English to Unix commands that are still being used by even the latest softwares such as Apples OS X and the Linux OS. Looks like the creator of Betty had a tough time juggling those commands and hence this. Says Jeff,
“It came out of my frustration from never remembering certain commands, like the specific flags for unarchiving a file. It’s hard to remember the exact compress and uncompress commands, and I would always look it up in my cheat sheet. ‘Betty, uncompress myfile.tar.gz.’”
Unlike its contemporaries Betty is not voice controlled and can process natural language much like Siri. Right now it can recognize only a small number of commands that Jeff himself had trouble with. But since its open source anyone can add to the library. On the long run Jeff hopes to make it voice recognizable and more.
You can run it on any Linux machine. You’ll also need Ruby and Git to be installed. Here are the instructions.
Betty at present has commands such as,
- count (number of characters in a file, number of words in a directory, etc.);
- datetime (current time, date, etc.);
- file / directory operations (compress/uncompress files, show file size, change permissions, etc.);
- user commands (what’s my username, real name, ip address, who else is logged in, etc.);
- Find (find in files);
- config (change your name);
- Internet / web queries (download some file, find out what’s the weather like, etc.);
- control iTunes and Spotify;
Here are some examples.
Source: Webupd