Re: PROPOSAL: Automatic wrapping of CLIs with GUIs

["Ben 'The Con Man' Kahn" <xkahn cybersites com>]

On Tue, 16 Jun 1998, Dirk Herrmann wrote:

> I'm dreaming of a solution for this. Two ideas come to mind:
> 1) The command line tools communicate with the shell. If the user types
>    TAB, the tool gets the current command line, parses it and reports the
>    possible completions to the shell, potentially including some helping
>    texts. This requires to modify all command line tools to understand the
>    corresponding protocol. I don't know much about CORBA, but I believe it
>    could be done that way.
> 2) I the user types TAB, a central database is asked for the possible
>    completions.

> The first solution is preferrable, since each tool holds the necessary
> information internally. Additional command line options are automatically
> available without need to update a central database.
>  
> Although I think it would be a great idea and quite useful as well for
> beginners as for advanced command line experts, it would require changes
> to a lot of tools.

	Did anyone ever use 4DOS or NDOS?  They had a nice feature.  After
you typed in a command, if you hit the F1 key, a help system would appear
with that command's man page.  It was great for those times when you've
just typed: "dir" and you forgot how to ONLY view directories.  

	NDOS also had a few other nice features.  One was command recall
-- if you typed in: "dir" and hit the up arrow, it would retrieve only the
commands in the history that began with those letters.

	Anyway, I think this is a very pleasent way of getting help.

						-Ben

------------------------------------ |\      _,,,--,,_  ,) ----------
Benjamin Kahn                        /,`.-'`'   -,  ;-;;'
(212) 924 - 2220                    |,4-  ) )-,_ ) /\
ben@cybersites.com --------------- '---''(_/--' (_/-' ---------------
 If you love something, write it in C; if it compiles, it is yours; 
                     if it doesn't, it never was.