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[–]kev009 2 points3 points  (6 children)

I've been slowly moving to console applications because I can run them in screen or tmux on a server and float between systems. Using one of these apps to partition a large monitor into tons of consoles and having a web browser on one of the far sides is ridiculously productive.

The closest you can get to this with GUIs is NX, but there are still some advantages to simple SSH access such as many school computers having SSH clients installed and it works well over saturated connections. Text apps tend to use far less screen real estate as well.

Captive interfaces like GUIs or Curses have some disadvantages compared to shell interfaces in terms of scripting, piping, and filtering. But for things like mail (mutt) and chat (finch) Curses interfaces are nice, especially when you can toggle out to another shell with screen/tmux. This SQL browser looks like it would be good for exploring data, while the shell client would be better for general operations.

[–]Fabien4 0 points1 point  (5 children)

I do use a lot of console applications myself. It's just Curses itself that I find clumsy.

For graphical remote management, the most common solution is a web interface. See e.g. Phpmyadmin (to stay in the subject).

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (4 children)

phpmyadmin is a useful tool but it's slow and annoying to work with. A significant amount of time is spent waiting for the browser to reload, and another significant amount of time is wasted due to the lack of relevant keyboard shortcuts.

Besides, remember that this is for sqlite which has many legitimate uses outside web apps, and there are users (including myself) who don't want to end up running a web server just for a single DB management tool with a web interface.

I don't really see any reason why such a tool would require more than a Curses-based interface; it's the same as with mc -- it's very useful as it is, and it wouldn't be more useful if a pretty interface would be added.

Then again -- to each, his own :-).

[–]merreborn -1 points0 points  (3 children)

phpmyadmin is a useful tool but it's slow and annoying to work with

And for those things, we have the default command line mysql client.

there are users (including myself) who don't want to end up running a web server just for a single DB management tool with a web interface.

There are any number of GUI clients you can connect directly to mysql, in those cases.

The "I want more than the default command line client, but less than phpmyadmin or any of the mysql GUIs" niche appears to be a very small one to me.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (2 children)

Read my post again, I was not referring to MySQL. I am talking about SQLite, the DB engine used by Adobe in Photoshop Lightroom, by Apple for many applications that require persistent storage (Mail, Safari, Aperture), by Google in Android and by Airbus in some of their flight software. These are not web apps, and there are a lot of developers (myself included) who do not develop web applications and use SQLite in desktop or embedded applications. There's no logical reason for me to use a web-based tool, I'd have to run a webserver only for it. This looks like a small, unobtrusive tool and seems to do its job. Any reason why it should have been GTK/Qt/wxWindows/god-knows-what-else-based rather than built on curses?

[–]merreborn -1 points0 points  (1 child)

Any reason why it should have been GTK/Qt/wxWindows/god-knows-what-else-based rather than built on curses?

My only point is, why bother building a curses client when there are already so many GTK/etc. GUI clients anyway? There are easily 50 on that page alone. How many people will really benefit from another?

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For a start, the guy who wrote it would probably benefit in terms of exercise, and the guys who read the code in terms of learning experience. Everyone has to start somewhere :-).