I've been using googlecl for quite a while to edit google docs in vim, but there are bugs/issues, specifically ongoing issues with newlines:

http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/issues/detail?id=301

When this post's site is back up, it will be interesting to see if a) their method is as simple as googlecl and b) if it utilizes googlecl, whether that newline issue has been addressed.

EDIT: ok, saw the google cached version. Still subject to newline issue as far as I can tell.

There already exists a great sort of generic API for working with data, it is called a filesystem... expose Google docs as a filesystem rather than making me type special overly-long commands

Ooooh! Look: http://code.google.com/p/google-docs-fs/

I hacked together a pipe tool for Google spreadsheets a few weeks ago. I need to get data from spreadsheets from other people, and then spit them back again. I wrote the pipe tool so that I can go

    googlepipe --command get --document $DOC_ID | $SCRIPT | googlepipe --command update --document $OUT_DOC_ID

It's a pretty neat way to work, and being able to revision control all of the input data, scripts and output data is a godsend.

For anyone wanting to try this on OS X Lion, I believe you have to install googlecl with Python gdata 2.0.14 [1] or you'll see something like the following after running "google docs <cmd>"

  File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/googlecl-0.9.13-py2.7.egg/googlecl/docs/client.py", line 55, in DocsClientCL
    DOCLIST_FEED_URI = gdata.docs.client.DOCLIST_FEED_URI

This started to look like a rabbit hole so I gave up there.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/issues/detail?id=468

Apparently the current svn sources of googlecl work with more recent versions of Python gdata.

Didn't for me.

I installed an earlier gdata thusly:

sudo pip install http://gdata-python-client.googlecode.com/files/gdata-2.0.14...

Its returning a 404 here is the content from Google Cache http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blog.mi...

Here's my shortcut for adding things to google calendar (something I do about twenty times a day): https://gist.github.com/2240229

    $ gcal Party Today
    Event created...

    I hope to soon see something like:

    cat ~/message.txt | google mail --to "user@gmail.com" --subject "Awesome!"

You can do that now:

    aptitude install sendEmail
    alias google-mail='sendEmail -f myaddress@gmail.com \
    -s smtp.gmail.com:587 -xu username -xp password'

Then

    cat ~/message.txt | google-mail -t "user@gmail.com" -u "Awesome!"

Sure, pre-defined command would be nicer, but if you use VIM, I assume this isn't too much for you ;)

Website is 404'ing. Wayback machine saved this back in August:

http://web.archive.org/web/20100815081530/http://blog.milfor...

I managed to have a look at it just before it went down (closed due to too much trafic?)

However, the googlecl seems to be rather old and it doesn't even work for me anymore (probably a compatibility issue with python gdata)

Sorry about the 404s, switching to a different caching plugin :P

Works fine out of the box on Plan 9, too. Pretty slick!