Re: [Evolution] CLI in the GUI

[Michael Poole <poole troilus org>]

This is a useful gadget.  Emacs provides two variants of this -- M-x
for "simple" commands (where you just need to specify the command to
invoke), and M-: for more complex commands, where you can enter any
elisp expression and emacs will evaluate it.

(vi also provides the same thing, but I'm an Emacs user, so I'll stay
with what I know.)

The second (more general) form of course requires fairly powerful
scripting support in the application.  This is more work, but it pays
off very quickly for power users.

One thing I like about the way that emacs provides this functionality
is that it can be invoked by a keypress regardless of what is
currently in your main buffer.  So it's context-insensitive, even if
some of the commands you can invoke through it do depend on context.
This is critical to making it useful to those power users -- if I had
to click on a text box to invoke the commands, I'd probably leave
emacs for vi :)

-- Michael

 "Tom Musgrove" <TomM pentawall com> writes:

> Reading Radagasts article on advogato made me think of an interface idea
> that I've had for some time now that would likely be handy for the majority
> of GUI apps.
>
> Many Unix users desire the efficiency of the CLI, whereas a GUI often has a
> much shallower learning curve.  Thus I propose the following...
>
> A widget that is the equivalent to the command line, where one enters
> commands in it just as any other command line interface.  It could be
> invoked by a key combination and just hover at the bottom of the screen, and
> probably only be one or two lines tall (just as the input box for IRC
> clients...).  It would lose focus or disappear by another key combination
> (for those tasks with which the GUI is more efficient...).   It would likely
> not be out by default, but if it were a consistent command to invoke it, it
> would likely be adopted by many projects, and used by many powerusers.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Tom M.
> TomM pentstar com