Linux Format forums

domjohnson · Joined: Sat Jun 05, 2010 10:25 pm Posts: 2

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

Dutch_Master · LXF regular Joined: Tue Mar 27, 2007 2:49 am Posts: 2359

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

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)

domjohnson · Joined: Sat Jun 05, 2010 10:25 pm Posts: 2

Rhakios · Posted: Sun Dec 12, 2010 11:54 am Post subject:

Whether using a GUI or not, translating the grep options into English would make a powerful tool accessible to many more people.
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nelz · Posted: Sun Dec 12, 2010 12:03 pm Post subject:

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.
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AndyBaxman · LXF regular Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:47 am Posts: 520

Rhakios · Posted: Sun Dec 12, 2010 6:44 pm Post subject:

nelz · Posted: Sun Dec 12, 2010 8:48 pm Post subject:

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
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guy · Posted: Sun Dec 12, 2010 9:01 pm Post subject:

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.
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Rhakios · Posted: Sun Dec 12, 2010 9:48 pm Post subject:

jjmac · Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2010 10:41 am Post subject:

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
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