[Nautilus-list] a little idea

[Marco Craveiro <soupdragon clix pt>]

hello fellow gnomers!

just had an idea that might be cool to implement. dont know if you are
familiar with a kde project, kaptain. well basically it enables you to
write a script that builds up a graphical interface for the options of
a particular comand line tool. you can find a great example at
http://www.hszk.bme.hu/~tz124/kaptain/docs/enscript.html. what i
thought was, if you merge this with nautilus scripts, you get a very
easy way for begginers to use the unix toolbox.  what i mean is,
change the nautilus script to be an xml file with:

a) the location of an icon file
b) a menu entry for the script
c) a tooltip for the icon
d) a gtk dialog with all the command line options for the tool. this
should have an "advanced help" button that sends you (via doc browser)
to the man page of the tool and a "begginers help" that gives you a
*simple* overview of the tool. this dialog ideally should be made in
glade and inserted in the xml file.
e) the location of the command line tool, which could be located
anywhere in the disk.
f) some kind of flag to allow / disallow / warn about using the tool
on binary files. if this flag is set, nautilus would check the file
type first before running the tool and take appropriate action.

this way you can basically have a toolbar with the unix utilities you
use the most, as well as a nice menu entry && tooltip (human readable
with spaces and all, not like the scripts do it at the moment). for
example, wc could be "count words" or "word count".

so you use nautilus to select the files and then click on a tool from
the toolbar to apply it to the files you've selected. then you get a
nice user friendly dialog with the options of the tool. one of the
options is where is the output going: it can either be a simple
message box (for things like wc) or it can go to clipboard so that you
can paste it on another application, or it can go to a pipe line - in
which case you get to pick another tool to filter again the output.

as a complement to this, we need some sort of mini application that
understands the gnu output, so that things like the output of grep can
be used to open up the files were the matches are.

and a nice little tool to generate the xml would come in handy as well
since this would mean anyone could make them (the UI part would of
course be done in glade).

and some sort of visual interface to the pipe line would be nice.

hell, you could even save a pipeline as a script and then create a
tool from it without even touching the command line! hahaha [mad
professor laughter :-)))]

i'm not yet sure on how to convert the options on the dialog to a
command line in a way that it would work for all programs, but all &
all it is a simple idea, isn't it? in terms of making unix easier for
begginers i think it would help a lot... would it be hard to integrate
this with nautilus, you reckon? 

i think i can handle the part outside nautilus but its the integration
that worries me...

soup, the dragon
-- 
And basically I sat in front of a conputer for four years. -- linus