InsideGoogle

Bloglines Has A Console

One think I loved about Quake and other shooters was hitting the tilde (~) key and bringing up the console and learning all the cool things you could make the game do by messing with it, inputting commands. Turns out the developers of the new Bloglines have included in it a console, too, and you can do a few things.

To bring up the console, hit the tilde key on your keyboard. It should be to the left of the “1″ key. You don’t actually need to hit tilde, leaving out the shift key and hitting “`” will also do.

You will see this message first, followed by a command line:

Welcome to
_ _ _ _
| |__ | | ___ __ _| (_)_ __ ___ ___
| '_ \| |/ _ \ / _` | | | '_ \ / _ \/ __|
| |_) | | (_) | (_| | | | | | | __/\__ \
|_.__/|_|\___/ \__, |_|_|_| |_|\___||___/
|___/ v3.0 (beta)
Proudly Made On Earth!

Type “help echo” and hit Enter to see a list of commands. Currently, it will return this:

# help echo
commands:
echo
set
show
type help command_name for specific help

Any command listed there can be further explained by typing help, then the name of the command. Obviously, “help echo” you just did, but “help set” shows you some parameters you can change. Currently, it gives you this:

# help set
set usage:
set hotkey action key
set theme theme_name
set text text_color
set background background_color

You can set certain action keys, different themes, different text colors and different background colors. you can use the show command to see what of those are available to you to set. Type “help show” and get this:

# help show
show usage:
show hotkeys
show keys
show themes
show profile

Problem is, the show command is disabled, so you’ll have to guess at the “set” commands. “set text” works, but it changes the text color of the console itself. For example, type “set text blue” and it will change the console text to blue. You can keep changing it, then switch to black to make it normal again.

You can also use “set background” to change the background color of the console. The console is much more readable with a black background and white text, so do that. Type first “set text white”, then “set background black”.

Trying to set a theme with “set theme” will fail unless you know a theme name, and I haven’t been able to find any. Another command that works is “clear”, which clears console output.

While I discovered the console last week and didn’t have enough time to play around with it, credit goes to TechOpus for discovering the “help” command that really got the ball rolling. If you can find any other commands comment below or use the contact form and we can further crack this thing open together.

September 17th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Apple, Ask, Blogs, AOL, General | one comment