While WFH for almost half a year already I found myself creating quite a lot Google Meet meetings, as it’s much faster to discuss something when you talk to a person, rather than over the text messages. However, creating a meeting takes some time, as you need to perform following actions:

• Switch to a browser
• Open meet.google.com
• Click “Join or start a meeting”
• Type a nickname or click to skip this step
• Copy link to the meeting to share

All those actions could be automated in a following script (or a three-liner command), which then can be executed with a shortcut:

#!/bin/bash

# Open a new meeting
xdg-open https://meet.google.com/new
# Wait till it creates a new 'room'
sleep 2
# Get the url to the meeting
xwininfo -tree -root | grep -oE 'https://[^ ]+' | xclip -selection clipboard

To make it work, you need to have xclip installed, to be able to write to the clipboard, and a browser extension, which adds the url to the window title.

For Google Chrome I use this one: URL in title, which should be setup first:
In Extension’s Options set following:

• Tab title format: {title} - {protocol}://{hostname}{port}/{path}
• Page URL filtering: Whitelist
• URL filters: ^https://meet\.google\.com/

And for Firefox this one: Add URL to Window Title

Then install the script to some folder, opt for example (you can get the latest version from gist), make it executable, and add a link to the /usr/local/bin to be able to call it from everywhere:

$ git clone https://gist.github.com/82f2cd547e627f76e09f640701369545.git
$ sudo cp ./82f2cd547e627f76e09f640701369545/start-a-meeting /opt
$ sudo chmod +x /opt/start-a-meeting
$ sudo /opt sudo ln -sf /opt/start-a-meeting /usr/local/bin/start-a-meeting

Now you can either call start-a-meeting from a terminal, or map a keyboard shortcut to it, and have a new meeting opened in a browser and a link in the clipboard.