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!
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 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.
There are already libraries like clap that allow the developer to specify all their arguments including short and long variants and description strings. I think some of them will automatically generate --help based on the specified options. I could imagine a library that takes the same specifications and makes an interactive menu or a tui form out of them. It’s an interesting idea.
I don’t think there is one yet… it would need some kind of way to understand the possible options and parameters for any given CLI program, and without a standardized interface for that, error-prone scraping of --help or just hard-coding popular options is probably the best you could do. Hopefully it wouldn’t end up looking something like the Scratch programming IDE though.
This reminds of jc which is kindof the opposite where it scrapes the output of common commands to present a more unified (JSON) syntax for other programs to consume and automate better.
The thing is that there is no middle ground, the terminal you described would either have the problems of a GUI (limited interactivity) or the problems of a CLI (unintuitive).
If you do a button to do things you’ve removed option to do different things, if you ask them for text you’ve removed the intuitivity of a button. If you present less options you might not cover all cases, if you present more options it’s a regular terminal.
It seems that the issue you have is that you need a way to quickly redo commands you’ve done before and you need a good way to know what options you have. I have 2 CLI solutions for you.
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If you press Ctrl+R and start typing a command it will auto-complete to the latest command you ran that matches
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If you install zsh and grml-zsh-config and switch to zsh you will have a very powerful auto-complete that will allow you to press tab to auto-complete most parameters of most common operations.
Yeah, I understand that this is difficult. But I am suggesting this considering lack of polish (ime) in commands.
On the recalling, remembering entire commands is not the problematic one for me. Rather, I want a quick way to go with which apps do which.
Also, terminals (that is, how most of the commands run) honestly do not look and feel good. I do think polished TUI could be a good solution, but they are not widespread.
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.
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.
This was my thought exactly. And I also had the same assessment that having various arguments be context aware would be challenging, since some have sub-arguments of their own (with further sub-arguments of their own, etc.) but can sometimes be strung together all on the same line. How do you determine if someone wants an ascendant argument or a descendant argument when you’re three layers deep into the tree?
You would have to make opinionated decisions, which was the whole reason to avoid scripts in the first place. Seems like it would be better to just make executable scripts (which is what Fedora Atomics basically do with the just command) or gamify learning how to work in the terminal.
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…
