One of the things that happened once getting to Ubuntu 12.04 was that gnome-do started acting up on me. Given that it’s a very minimally maintained project, I decided it was time to move on. Ubuntu’s dash provides a lot of the same functionality, so I finally started using it. But, I missed a few things.

Gnome-do isn’t just a launcher for programs, it’s an actions engine. It has support for Pidgin buddy lists, an I even wrote an NX launcher for it. I didn’t really want to give either of those up, so I started trying to figure out how to add those to Unity’s launcher itself.

Unity lenses, the plugins that support results, are written in either vala or python. Given that I’m trying to reflex my python muscles now, I decided that was my way in. After a few false starts I found the One Hundred Scopes project, which is an attempt to build a whole set of Unity lenses to add functions and examples for the world.

The wikipedia example is a good starting point. It gives you an idea of how to build a custom search and return results. That enabled me to build a basic launcher that fed up file urls for launching nx sessions, and I created an pushed unity-lens-nx that implements that.

But, pidgin is a little harder. There is no file to open for pidgin, this is about communicating with another program over dbus, and catching the action to do something else with dbus. Fortuntately through the help of David Callé I figured it out. Also, once I had it I found some good tricks (and a couple of undocumented dbus methods) here –  https://github.com/gregorl/Unity-Pidgin-Lens which I used as inspiration.

The net result is unity-lens-pidgin.

Super + b and search you buddy list. It only displays currently online buddies, and available buddies are preferred over unavailable ones. You can get it via ppa here.

There is plenty more to do. The search results should be smarter, especially taking into account most recently contacted buddies, which means integrating with zeitgeist or something equivalent. Ideas floating around there. I’d like to do some overlays with status icons, just to give a visual clue on either protocol or current status state.

If anyone else wants to help, or has their own ideas, I’d encourage you to join in on the conversation. The One Hundred Scopes community is pretty cool, and I’m happy to make their vision a little closer to reality.