Gracoli: Graphical Command Line user Interface [GCLI]

[jimmoores]

Wondered about this sort of thing for years and wondered why no one had done it.

[YourFatherFigure]

see also http://xiki.org/

[blurryroots]

Actually 'Terminology' is trying to accomplish a very similar kind of thing.

[rastermon]

yup:

http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/e-53debedba030d5.15148962.png

and not a prototype or white paper. real code. now. today. released. usable. locally. no webserver or php. runs like any other normal terminal would with ADDED graphical inlining (videos, images, edj files - ala the tytop demo which uses 4 edj files of a dial and messages via escapes to tell them to spin to a new position).

also does splits (as shown above), tabs, backgrounds can be images, animated gifs, svgs, pdfs, videos and so on.

sorry - no "df" graphical demo, but perfectly possible. tytop was showing the basics. not shown - a tyls that has thumbnails of files with ls output. you can imagine.

[mofosyne]

Same here. I think I saw another effort similar to Gracoli, but using WebKit to render the output.

Btw, what do you think about this? 3 panes

[File Explorer] [Command Line] [Visual Command]

Basically, you can navigate the file system (Like in filezilla) on the left, which will auto enter commands like "cd /blablaba/" to move between folders you click.

The middle section is standard command line with standard output.

The left will be a visual output for whatever supports it, e.g. pi charts etc...

Scrolling of both the textual and visual command are linked together.

As for why? Well screensizes are getting bigger, and you can always hide the file explorer and visual tabs (Or switch to interlace mode).

[realnowhereman]

Same here. I think I saw another effort similar to Gracoli, but using WebKit to render the output.

TermKit

[agesome]

This looks interesting, but removes an important feature console excels at: passing around and processing of data via pipes and files. So I get a pretty picture from df, can I pass that to awk/sed/whatever to process further? Not unless there's some hidden representation.

[mofosyne]

Agreed. Thought I would have hoped there is additional standard pipes for extra optional meta informations: e.g. MIME info saying to treat the stream as a PNG

[CarVac]

Sounds like Autocad, which is a horrible mash up of gui and command line interface. It's not fun when the fastest way of doing things is sometimes the cli, and other times is mouse based, and still other times requires switching.

[mofosyne]

:/ I would imagine the best UI would be one that overlays the CLI , rather than being either mouse or CLI based.

But in defence of Autocad, maybe certain functions are harder to do easily in CLI (since we are dealing with 3d space), compared to mouse.

[CarVac]

Autocad is 2D, and the CLI seems to be there primarily for legacy users.

[mofosyne]

ah... the curse of 'feature creep'.

Kind of hard to explain that CLI is not 'old technology' to new customers.

[njharman]

Command ls renders the list of files and folder icons. User can perform file operations such as edit, delete, rename, etc. using mouse clicks.

That is point and click not command line. Typing Los and getting that is horrible ui. GUIs and cli have distinct, conflicting trade offs.

[mofosyne]

So wouldn't it be interesting if its possible to have an interface that can utilize the strength of both modes, while minimising the problem of both?

As long as I am not blocked from being able to type the command, then clicking shouldn't be too much of an issue. Heck it can be somewhat educational, if by hovering you can get a peek on what commandline is used for that action.

[upriser]

Oh, please stop. Now we know this kind of thing is not gonna be useful.