this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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A strange "terminal emulator" idea I got, tho I bet this exists (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 months ago by someacnt_@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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 upgrade might 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!

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[–] refalo@programming.dev 15 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] Octorine@midwest.social 1 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] someacnt_@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What kind of GUI allows you to launch CLIs with certain configurability?

[–] refalo@programming.dev 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] someacnt_@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

Hmm, --help parsing can be screwy, I guess. Maybe there is a way through autocompletion machinery.