YubNub Command Playground

yubnub.org — command shell

Type a command and press RUN or hit Enter. Click any example below to load it. For commands not listed here, the real yubnub.org knows thousands more.

▸ POPULAR COMMANDS — click to try

▸ COMMAND SYNTAX

Every YubNub command looks like COMMAND [ARGS]. The command name is a short alias; the rest is your query.

g nasa → Google search for "nasa" yt cat videos → YouTube search for "cat videos" w black hole → Wikipedia article on "black hole" imdb inception → IMDB search for "inception" wa integrate x^2 dx → Wolfram|Alpha computation giphy dancing → Giphy search for "dancing"

Commands are defined by the community — anyone can add one on yubnub.org/add_command.

▸ YUBNUB HISTORY

2005Jon Aquino builds YubNub in 20 minutes as a Rails demo during Paul Graham's Startup School. It wins the "best hack" prize.
2006Featured on Lifehacker, del.icio.us popular, and tech blogs worldwide. Community grows to thousands of commands.
2008Firefox and later Chrome adopt "keyword search" — a feature directly inspired by YubNub's paradigm.
2012Server still running on Ubuntu 12.04. Jon keeps the site alive for the community even as usage shifts to browser built-ins.
2025Jon uses Claude Code to migrate YubNub from Ubuntu 12.04 → Ubuntu 24.04, upgrading to PHP 8.3, MySQL 8.0, and HTTPS. Zero downtime during the DNS cutover.
Nowyubnub.org is live, HTTPS, and ready for another 20 years.

▸ ABOUT YUBNUB

YubNub is a social command-line for the web, created by Jonathan Aquino (that's Jon!) in 2005. The idea is simple: instead of navigating to a site and typing in a search box, you type a short command and your arguments in a single line. g nasa googles "nasa." yt lofi searches YouTube. wa pi digits asks Wolfram|Alpha.

The twist is that commands are community-defined. Anybody can create a new shortcut pointing to any URL pattern. Over the years, users have contributed thousands of commands — from mainstream search engines to obscure academic databases and niche wikis.

In December 2025, Jon upgraded YubNub's aging server infrastructure using Claude Code as a sysadmin guide, moving from a 2012-era Ubuntu install all the way to modern PHP 8.3 and MySQL 8.0. Read about it on his blog.

→ Try the real YubNub · → Source on GitHub