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A strange "terminal emulator" idea I got, tho I bet this exists

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!

refalo ,

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.

someacnt_ OP ,

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

refalo ,

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_ OP ,

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

Octorine ,

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.

k4j8 ,

Interesting idea. If you really break it down, the “terminal with command buttons” is similar in concept to saving each of the commands as a script and putting those scripts in a directory to act as “buttons.”

I’ve also seen some programs such as Kopia, a backup tool, that provide a GUI with the equivalent terminal commands for what is bring done shown at the bottom.

I don’t think what you’re describing exists, probably because experts don’t need it and beginners would prefer a full GUI.

There is Nushell, which promises more helpful error responses for the terminal, but its too early for it to be targeted at beginners in my opinion.

Nibodhika ,

As much as I love nushell it will ever be too early for beginners, POSIX compliance is a big problem there. They have their very good reasons to not be POSIX compliant, but someone starting out should familiarize themselves with the most common pattern first before jumping to something completely different that will prevent them from running code snippets they might find online.

AbouBenAdhem , (edited )

Rather than creating a custom terminal app, could you create a user that only had permission to run the restricted commands, with a profile script that gets run at login and offers a menu of common tasks?

someacnt_ OP ,

Interesting, does this exist? That would be a great one to use.

mkwt ,

For example, synaptic is a long running front end for apt that has the buttons for update and upgrade.

someacnt_ OP ,

My idea is more to have (configurable) set of commands that you can run, where its results are received mostly as a text. In this way, you can interact via terminal more easily, I’d imagine.

vrighter ,

so… you invented hotkeys?

someacnt_ OP ,

What are hotkeys?

vrighter ,

a configurable set of commands with a keyboard shortcut attached to them.

someacnt_ OP ,

…Keyboard shortcuts are not necessarily the solution.

vrighter ,

the shortcuts usually are associated with a button or menu item that could be pressed.

joeldebruijn ,

Let’s say … like a ScratchJr but for terminal commands …

someacnt_ OP ,

You say that like it’s a bad thing, but, scratch exists. Further, you have to face that the "infantile " UI is trendy.

joeldebruijn ,

Wasn’t sarcastic at all! I do think the visual coding style can be an inspiration for cli also.

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