I know that GUI does not cover most of functionalities, for good reasons - being specialized to task (like files app), it provides more fine-grained experience.
Yet, I find that there are common commands which is terminal-only, or not faithfully implemented. for instance,
- Commands like
apt update/apt upgrademight be needed, as GUI may not allow enough interactions with it. - I heard some immutable distros require running commands for rollbacks.
These could cause some annoyance for those who want to avoid terminal unless necessary (including me). Hence, I bet there are terminal emulators which restricts what commands you could run, and above all, present them as buttons. This will make you recall the commonly used commands, and run them accordingly. Is there projects similar to what I describe? Thanks!
This actually exists, but for a different operating system. The AS400 (aka iSeries) had a command line where programs had a standard way to specify parameters, so that pressing a prompt key (F4) would allow you to build the proper command line by filling a form. I do miss that, pity it doesn’t exist for Linux.
I understand the desire to want to avoid the command line, but you’re severely restricting your ability to troubleshoot by doing so. Every operating system has a terminal and command line, and there’s going to be cases where you’ll want to drop into a shell to do something that has no GUI equivalent.
Yeah I am not suggesting an entire terminal replacement, which is unreasonable.
I dont think you should habe to learn to usw the terminal in order to debug your operating system. If i would switch my mom to Linux, i dont want her to have to use the terminal. So making life easier for those people would grealty improve the appeal of Linux to tech noobs. By arguing we need the terminal for Linux, we gatekeep people from trying and using Linux, if they are afraid of technology
I think you could get really happy with fish or at least bash history autocompletion.
A flexible command runner, easy to add new buttons, spawning a terminal window to show the results, would also be useful.
I agree on the issue
What about something like navi - https://github.com/denisidoro/navi. Basically an interactive cheat sheet that has commands pre-loaded (or that you can make yourself).
Woah this is rad! Thahk you!!
Sounds like YaST
I know that GUI does not cover most of functionalities
specialized to task
Yet, I find that there are common commands
present them as buttons
Congratulations you just reinvented the GUI while trying to get away from it at the same time.
Perhaps something a little more “in-between” the two might be a GUI that allows running arbitrary programs… something smarter than a launcher but more generic than a purpose-built function-limited interface… if such a thing can even exist.
Coming back to this with thoughts. What you’re describing sounds a lot like a menu tree.
“Press 1 to do this, 2 to do that, 3 to go to submenu A, 4 for B,” etc.
1“You have pressed 1. Do you want to turn on option ABC? [Y / n]”
Y“Do you want option QWERTY47? [Y/n]”
N“Are you sure you want to run
notthebees --abc --no-qwerty47? [Y/n]”N“Aborted.”
It sounds like a standards problem waiting to happen because no two menus will be alike, but hey, things like this can and do exist, and setting one up isn’t that hard, only time consuming.
Something like this can kind of be achieved programmatically by unraveling bash completion arguments and loosely parsing terminal help strings.
They aren’t all formatted uniformly though, so you’ll need to come up with a filtering mechanism to prevent returning garbage. You’ll also always be a little out of date…
You could create a list of commands in a text file, and then pipe that into fzf. With a light wrapper that would allow you to type a portion of the command to select and execute it.
Long ago I made such restricted shell with filtering the shell command history file then disabling command history logging. With some shell scripting, I think you can get more sophisticated version. What shell are you using? (Bash, Fish, Zsh, etc.)
I am using bash, which is indeed part of the problem. What emulator would you suggest, and how did you achieve it?
Bash should be fine. On typical Bash installation I think this will work (please try to understand each command line before you actually try):
$ cp ~/.bashrc ~/.bashrc.bak $ cp ~/.bash_history ~/.bash_history.bak $ printf 'set +o history' >> ~/.bashrc $ printf "sudo apt update\nsudo apt upgrade\n" > .bash_history $ (Press Ctrl+D to logout)For the next bash session you can refer only the two commands from the history with Up/Down/C-p/C-n.
For example, synaptic is a long running front end for apt that has the buttons for update and upgrade.
My idea is more to have (configurable) set of commands that you can run, where its results are received mostly as a text. In this way, you can interact via terminal more easily, I’d imagine.
so… you invented hotkeys?
What are hotkeys?
a configurable set of commands with a keyboard shortcut attached to them.
…Keyboard shortcuts are not necessarily the solution.
Just create GUI application for the things you want. There’s already lots of them.
Otherwise there’s always “–help”.
I mean, there are already tons of applications that lets you e.g. update, like
apt update/upgradedoes.One issue with it is that it fails time to time, and error messages the GUI usually conveys are subpar. That’s why I think you cannot avoid terminals. I just want some middle ground for that.
Also, ik this is nitpicking but… while apt is good on this front… what about the CLIs whose --help gives hundreds of lines?
I mean, there are already tons of applications that lets you e.g. update, like
apt update/upgradedoes.Bingo.
while apt is good on this front… what about the CLIs whose --help gives hundreds of lines?
Read them. There’s a reason some programs have many options. Avoiding the CLI isn’t the solution.
The apps just fail and crash randomly, any linux users cannot entirely rely on them. Well, I guess linux is destined for 2% of desktop users, who can use terminal on a daily basis, and current rise is just a fluke.
Well, I guess linux is destined for 2% of desktop users, who can use terminal on a daily basis, and current rise is just a fluke.
Dunno what you’re talking about. Most people I’ve seen who have made the switch just go learn how to use the terminal. You’ll have to eventually, since many people have use cases that fall outside the sane defaults of whatever distro you chose, and there’s tons of videos, online communities, and written tutorials to help.
The rest know somebody who can help or just want a system that can do whatever defaults it’s been set up to do out of the box (e.g. open pictures, use a web browser, play Steam games, etc.).
Yes, that’s fine. If you didn’t like Linux you’re welcome to not use it.
You see the console as a flaw. Some of us see it as an advantage.
This reminds me of something from my ancient past. Back in the early-ish days of Apple, there was a development system called MPW (Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop) which included its own little kludgy shell.
The weird thing about it though was while you could enter commands on the command line like in any shell, you could prefix them with the word
commando(presumably a portmanteau of “command” and “window”) and this window would pop up showing various buttons, checkboxes, etc. correponding to command line options. When you ok’d the window, it would generate the command line for you.I’m rather hazy about how all this worked, but I think there was some sort of template language to define the window layout if you wanted to add commando support for your own tool? And presumeably, as you say, you could restrict what’s possible with the window interface as you deemed fit?
Seems like what I was roughly thinking of. I guess it fell into obscurity for good reasons, but I do think this kind of tool would be great for some edge-cases - that is, you cannot yet avoid terminal.
The thing about the MPW Shell is it was sort of the only game in town if you actually wanted a command line with the classic Mac OS. (There’s an awesome little emulator called SheepShaver if you ever want to explore it btw.) Well, I suppose there was A/UX. I thought it was a miracle when that came out. You have to realize in those early days a good chunk of the operating system itself was actually baked in to ROM. (You had to do desperate things to squeeze a GUI out of such limited resources as existed back then!) So to this day I have no idea how they managed to spin off a 'nix despite that.
Anyways. I wonder, if you made some sort of template format today, to what extent you could write some sort of conversion tool that would scrape a man page or whatever to rough it in and then you could tweak it to get what you want? man pages aren’t super standardized in their format I guess, so it’s probably more trouble than it’s worth. I like to use Python’s
argparsewhen rolling out scripts myself, and its--helpformat is pretty rigid given that it’s algorithmically generated. Might be more plausible with something like that? I had a quick look just now to see if you can drill down into theargparse.ArgumentParserclass itself to pull out the info more directly, but it seems a rather opaque thing that doesn’t expose public APIs for that. Oh well…
