For those of you not familiar with Gnome-Do, it’s a very nifty way of accessing commonly used files, actions, tasks, etc in your system. It’s a bit hard to explain with words so check out the screencast. Many of you will recognize its functionality to be very similar to GNOME Launch Box,  Quicksilver for the Mac, or launchy for Windows. Gnome-Do of course runs on Linux and it is written in C# using Mono.

The plugin architecture is decently documented, and because it is open source, it is very easy to dive into the code and learn how things are setup to get you quickly going with plugin development.

So, after some researching and hacking around, I came up with “ManLookUp”. It is a is a very simple Gnome-Do plugin that allows to quickly search for man pages installed in your system. One can either type the command: “Man lookup” “View Manual Page” “Read Manual”-> hit Tab  to get a list of pages + description of the entry or search for a man page entry directly. Selecting one of the entries brings up the man page entry on a terminal window. Selected text as well as Application Items indexed by Do itself are also supported. I hope this plugin is helpful for others as well.

Monodevelop project, release/debug binary, and of course, sources can be downloaded from:

http://www.loconet.ca/files/ManLookUp-1.0.tar.gz

Screenshot:

Development site: https://code.launchpad.net/~loconet/do-plugins/ManLookUp

Screenshot of my desktop: