I already am quite familiar with terminal, and am aware of how to handle it. I do have issues that I am using plain old bash, but it’s not unfamiliarity that is my problem.
It’s more that there are common commands that I am dealing with, I (somehow) don’t like entering it in terminal format.
About warp, that seems roughly what I want, but the AI part irks me. I dunno, I gotta look more dseply.
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 argparse when rolling out scripts myself, and its –help format 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 the argparse.ArgumentParser class 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…
I mean, there are already tons of applications that lets you e.g. update, like apt update/upgrade does.
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?
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.).
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.
If you press Ctrl+R and start typing a command it will auto-complete to the latest command you ran that matches
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.
I think it would be very awkward, because then you need to look for the right button, move your mouse to it, click it, and then start looking for the next button, click it and so on.
For simple scenarios where you just need to click install, the gui can be great, but I think it’s not good enough for most commands with flags and options.
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.)
Most people have answered doing a rollback is the best way. I usually find some updates break things then later updates dont have the issues.
But I wanted to add if you go in to yast snapshots and double click a snapshot you can actually select specific changes to rollback via checkboxes. I’ve not tried this yet though because of dependencies and whatnot
Personally, I’d go with the clean Fedora install on the new drive and copy your data over as someone else mentioned, then expand Windows once you 100% happy with it.
(I did something similar with WinXP years ago… eventually dropping Windows, so that harddrive just became a data drive)
I think I’ll take a backup then try to clone the disk with btrfs send/receive and keep that as a solution in case something goes wrong. Thanks for answering!
This is probably the worst way to let the community create a logo. I don’t understand why don’t just have a normal competition where people send in images?
Nothing organized, its a mess, no rules, everyone does what they want, no real project files to work on in a professional way. Why not let people create images and send them individually? Makes much more sense for a logo design.
I’m doing this with three other people. I just shared it here if anyone wants to help. That’s all. I was part of the German organization the entire time. This is just some own lil project.
I wasn’t criticizing the project itself, but this kind of project. I have seen this multiple times (with other logo creation for canvas) and don’t get the usefulness of it for creating a logo. And I thought this was an official Logo contest and may have missed the point. If this is just a fun project, then my critique does not apply and I apology in that case.
Not good initial experience: starts with the colonial UK flag which is not a symbol for languages, site doesn’t quite work without JS so no menu access (popover works without JS), puts proprietary services Microsoft GitHub & Reddit in priority position, using VC funding leads to hesitation, no mention in the FAQs or otherwise how to contribute to the code (not for general users sure, but missing entirely).
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.
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