Connect Your Favorite Text Editor to Google Docs Using GoogleCL

Productivity Sauce

You can put Google's command-line tools (GoogleCL) to all kinds of clever uses from publishing blog posts to accessing and editing Google Docs documents using your favorite text editor. The latter can come in handy if you want to quickly modify the existing document, bypassing Google Docs' interface and the browser altogether.

To make GoogleCL work its magic, you have to install it on your machine. First off, grab the latest version of Google Data from the project's Web site and install it using the following commands:

tar xvfz gdata-x-x-xx.tar.gz
cd gdata-x-x-xx/
sudo python setup.py install

Download then GoogleCL, and install it as follows:

tar xvfz googlecl-x-x-xx.tar.gz
cd googlecl-x-x-xx/
sudo python setup.py install

To open an existing document in Gedit, use the following command:

google docs edit --title "Document Title" --editor gedit

This opens the specified document, and you can edit it to your heart's content. But what if you don't remember the exact name of the document you want to open? No problem. Run the google docs list title command which lists all documents stored in Google Docs.

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