Linux Format forums

Re: Which Linux commands need GUIs?

jjmac — Wed Dec 15, 2010 10:41 am

Author: jjmac

Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2010 10:41 am

Sounds like a good idea to me.

A gui for commands that can cause problems when a person is fatigued. Acting as a kind of safety buffer.

Gui front with script backs.

nb: edited a lot.

jm

Re: Which Linux commands need GUIs?

Rhakios — Sun Dec 12, 2010 9:48 pm

Author: Rhakios

Posted: Sun Dec 12, 2010 9:48 pm

nelz wrote:

There's also Kodos and Redet

I noticed Kodos in the repos, but it said something about Python regular expressions, so I didn't think it was what I was looking for.

Edit: I see that the developer of Redet recommends Txt2regex for novices, I've been looking at the screenshots for Txt2regex and my head has begun to hurt.

Re: Which Linux commands need GUIs?

guy — Sun Dec 12, 2010 9:01 pm

Author: guy

Posted: Sun Dec 12, 2010 9:01 pm

Probably pretty impossible, but I have dreamed of a dynamic, general-purpose GUI that adapts its display for the selected utility. On selecting a utility, the GUI app would parse the associated man page and create GUI widgets for the various options available. Well, maybe not the man page, but you get the idea. It's not a hard-coded GUI but a dynamic one capable of supporting multiple utilities.
It could also offer simple interactions between supported utilities such as piping.

High on my list come graphical file tinkering utilities such as ps2pdf.
So for example I could take a pile of mixed graphics & photo formats, convert them all to pdf and merge into a single, paginated print file, all with one tool.

Also high on my list, but probably not on many others, comes Adrian Rossiter's Antiprism toolchain for displaying polyhedra.

The ultimate dream is an OS where, by design, the CLI and auto-GUI both hook into the same user service function and so by definition implement the same functionality and are genuine alternatives. Other UI's - audio, tactile, etc. could also hook into the same user service.

Re: Which Linux commands need GUIs?

nelz — Sun Dec 12, 2010 8:48 pm

Author: nelz

Posted: Sun Dec 12, 2010 8:48 pm

Kate does regexp searches, so you can use it for regex testing with KDE, but it's a shame kregexpeditor didn't make the transition.

There's also Kodos and Redet

Re: Which Linux commands need GUIs?

Rhakios — Sun Dec 12, 2010 6:44 pm

Author: Rhakios

Posted: Sun Dec 12, 2010 6:44 pm

nelz wrote:

Do you mean the regular expressions? There are a couple of regular expression editors available, KDE includes one, for testing regexes with a GUI, although I'm usually unconscious from banging my head on the wall before I remember to use one.

Yes. That is what I mean, but KRegExpEditor seems not to have been carried over to KDE4. Looking in Synaptic on Kubuntu 10.04 (still prefer synaptic) the only similar thing I can see is searchmonkey. I might give it a look.

Re: Which Linux commands need GUIs?

AndyBaxman — Sun Dec 12, 2010 4:55 pm

Author: AndyBaxman

Posted: Sun Dec 12, 2010 4:55 pm

nelz wrote:

I'm usually unconscious from banging my head on the wall before I remember to use one.

So glad it's not just me.....

Re: Which Linux commands need GUIs?

nelz — Sun Dec 12, 2010 12:03 pm

Author: nelz

Posted: Sun Dec 12, 2010 12:03 pm

Do you mean the regular expressions? There are a couple of regular expression editors available, KDE includes one, for testing regexes with a GUI, although I'm usually unconscious from banging my head on the wall before I remember to use one.

Re: Which Linux commands need GUIs?

Rhakios — Sun Dec 12, 2010 11:54 am

Author: Rhakios

Posted: Sun Dec 12, 2010 11:54 am

Whether using a GUI or not, translating the grep options into English would make a powerful tool accessible to many more people.

Re: Which Linux commands need GUIs?

domjohnson — Sat Dec 11, 2010 11:48 pm

Author: domjohnson

Posted: Sat Dec 11, 2010 11:48 pm

Dutch_Master wrote:

Things to consider:
adduser+addgroup, likewise deluser+del-group

What about System > Administration > Users and Groups (this is in Ubuntu, of course, don't know about other distro's)

Re: Which Linux commands need GUIs?

Dutch_Master — Sat Dec 11, 2010 10:59 pm

Author: Dutch_Master

Posted: Sat Dec 11, 2010 10:59 pm

I doubt a GUI for specific commands would be better then the cli option, but that's personal, isn't it?

Things to consider:
adduser+addgroup, likewise deluser+del-group
iptables
log-rotation (not strictly cli stuff, but a unified GUI for system and application logs would be useful)
rsync/scp (source, destination (remote!), directories include+exclude, exchange trusted ssh keys)

Which Linux commands need GUIs?

domjohnson — Sat Dec 11, 2010 9:17 pm

Author: domjohnson

Posted: Sat Dec 11, 2010 9:17 pm

Hi,
A while back, I saw an article in LXF about entitled something like "20 things we'd change about Linux". One of them was to have everything done by command line.

I've just registered a project over at SourceForge - http://sourceforge.net/projects/blizzardsoft BlizzardSoft. With it, I intend to fill the gap of GUI-less commands by creating front-ends for some commands. If you were a new user and really didn't like the command line at all, which commands would you ask for a GUI for?

Thanks in advance - Dom