Re: [gtk-list] Re: PROPOSAL: Automatic wrapping of CLIs with GUIs

[lutterdc cs purdue edu (David Lutterkort)]

On 18 Jun 1998,  Kenneth Albanowski <kjahds@kjahds.com> wrote:
> 
> Some miscellaneous comments of mine: first of all, this has all already
> been done. (It would be strange if it had not, after all, it's an obvious
> idea.) There is a package (which I forget the name of, amusingly) that
> give you a better-then-getopt package which also autogenerates csh
> completion records, _and Tcl/Tk dialogs_, among other things.
> 

Do you have any kind of pointers for this ? A URL, a name anything ? It
would be very interesting to see.

> beyond that it gets a little shaky. Does one _really_ want a GUI
> interaction to `ls`, especially if the result is no better then the ls
> command line?

`ls` is a very academic example, since in a graphical environment there are
better ways of getting this kind of information -- but then it might help
somebody determined to learn command line interaction. Besides, there _are_
lots of commands for which at least I would prefer such a GUI-type system
over the manpage.

> from the GUI). The point being that turning a command line into radio
> buttons, check boxes and file selectors is not going to magically turn a
> command-line app into a GUI wonder. This sort of technique is not very
> like to be able to turn the infozip tools into `winzip`. 

Definitely not, but that's not what I had in mind, anyway.

David