20 ms·

CLUI: Building a Graphical Command Line

596 points by amasad 7y ago

perl4ever 7y ago
I never used it a great deal, but I had the impression that MPW (Macintosh Programmers' Workshop) was an evolution of the command line that unfortunately didn't really catch on.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Waterluvian 7y ago
This might be what they're getting at. Discoverability with the basic Python repl is bad. You can use help and dir and both are clunky. But install ipython and you're off to the races with autocomplete menus you can arrow key through.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  ptpython is great at that also and probably easier to grok at first. The fish shell does much of this as well but is not as attractive.
tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
This is really cool. I'm actually building a coding language for UI designers, and a UI like this would be super helpful.
- moudy 7y ago
  that sounds interesting. do you have anything you can share?
  - tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
    Not yet, but hopefully I'll have something simple to show in the next few months.
iovrthoughtthis 7y ago
This is great and a very powerful technique. Are there any things like this that provide similar interfaces for OSs?
- khimaros 7y ago
  Requires a bit of initial setup, but possible it's what you're looking for: https://github.com/denisidoro/navi https://github.com/denisidoro/navi Also, at least some of the scaffolding for CLUI seems to be available at https://github.com/replit/clui https://github.com/replit/clui
syrusakbary 7y ago
This is awesome! <3 I think the technique of creating UI forms based on GraphQL metadata is going to be key for building the admin tools of the future.
microcolonel 7y ago
Most of the tools to do this exist in ordinary terminal emulators, with ordinary shells. This would be interesting as an extension for Fish or similar. AFAIK (somewhat) typed auto-complete information is already available for a lot of commands.
flyinglizard 7y ago
Last year I made a bulk photo management software using this exact UI pattern. It’s very effective.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dreary_dugong 7y ago
While I agree wholeheartedly with the stated goals, I do worry that the CLUI isn't quite as perfect s solution as it's implied to be. The CLUI is listed as having all of the upsides of both GUI and CLI but none of the downsides of either, but I feel it's more like halfway on everything. It's /more/ approachable than a CLI, but still /less/ approachable than a GUI and this goes for most of the categories listed. It's still an interesting idea but it strikes me as a bit risky. At what point does less approachable become too unapproachable? I fear CLUI may have accidentally gained many of the downsides at the same time as mere pieces of the upsides
- airstrike 7y ago
  I agree. It feels like an improvement over the very limited interaction from a plain CLI, but it isn't foolproof. The user still needs to know e.g. whether the right way to set an user's role is through 'admin roles' or 'admin user'
  - tangert 7y ago
    replit designer here - yes, totally agree. the current implementation definitely is not foolproof, but it's just the start. ideally it will handle more unstructured commands in the future!
    - airstrike 7y ago
      For the avoidance of doubt: I think this is awesome! Keep up the good work!
      - tangert 7y ago
        thank you :)
- tangert 7y ago
  interesting point. luckily we're testing it in a pretty sandboxed environment so it's not going to overtake replit all at once. I think the power will come from integrating CLUI seamlessly into the parts of GUIs people are really accustomed to. luckily all the questions you raise are totally testable and will be a part of our research process :)
carapace 7y ago
> On a technical level, a CLUI command is conceptually similar to a file path or URL. Since a complete CLUI command is simply a path down the command tree, each potential subcommand is like a portion of a file path or URL. Flags, on the other hand, function like query parameters. CLUI’s resemblance to URL paths means you can send someone a complete, executable CLUI command as a URL. They’re mapped 1:1. This is really cool. > Since we have a GraphQL backend, we know all the potential fields and arguments a client can use. By using an introspection query we generate a tree of commands/sub-commands that map onto their respective resolve functions. Now, to add a new admin command all that's needed is a new field on a GraphQL type. And that's really really cool. The main thing I see that could be improved would be a clear, simple underlying model or metaphor, a semantic layer that sits between the CLUI and the GraphQL backend, to unify and simplify the various contexts and languages and runtimes and whatever. I've been toying with a UI demo that unifies GUI and CLI through a dialect of the Joy language. Everything you can do at the CLI can be done through the mouse, and everything done through the mouse has a corresponding textual representation as Joy code. It's inspired by Oberon OS and Jef Raskin's "Humane Interface" (among other influences.) I haven't integrated widgets (yet) because you mostly don't need them, mostly. W/O getting into a lot of details, there are no menus nor buttons because any text can be used to activate any command and/or enter any data; there are no forms because the UI metaphor (Joy) is stack-based so you just put values onto the stack; and so on.
- asiachick 7y ago
  Autodesk Maya has always been both CLI and GUI based. Every GUI interaction generates a visible CLI command you could have typed to accomplish the same thing. It’s been the way since PowerAnimator in the 90s
  - kragen 7y ago
    I think AutoCAD has been this way for a long time too. The first version I used was 2.14K+ADE; you could invoke any operation from the keyboard (and often had to) but I don't remember if selecting from menus with the mouse would generate the CLI command. In later versions of AutoCAD it did.
Someone 7y ago
Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop had something similar in 1986 (http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/tools/mpw-tools/commandref/commando.html http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/too...). It was incredibly useful. Apple’s first Unix copied that in 1988 (http://toastytech.com/guis/aux3.html http://toastytech.com/guis/aux3.html) Powershell has ‘Show-Command’ which also is similar (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/show-command?view=powershell-7 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...) I think PowerShell generates the GUI, while MPW commando had human-designed dialogs (and, for complex commands such as compilers, sub-dialogs) I think this is worth copying in modern Unixes. Those GUIs make it way easier to use rarely used flags than man pages.
- jayd16 7y ago
  Powershell ISE has intellisense too. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/components/ise/introducing-the-windows-powershell-ise?view=powershell-7 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/compon...
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Visual Studio Code has replaced ISE.
    - jayd16 7y ago
      How do I get intellisense in the VSC terminal? Best I can figure out is I have to make a file and run that.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        Not sure what you mean, it does do completion just like the regular Powershell terminal window.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Such a shame AUX was abandoned.
atoav 7y ago
As somebody who worked professionally with Adobe Premiere I think the criticism of its UI misses the point. Premiere was never meant for hobbyists (reflected by it's actual name: Premiere _Pro_). The only valid point made here is that it is hard to learn for someone who never used any editing software at all. But it certainly isn't slow or "unfocused". That source monitor is on screen for a reason. Keyboard shortcuts will always be faster than moving your mouse around. And by the way: Premiere has a modular interface, so if you hate the clutter or don't need it, you can get rid of it. If you are the person who just wants to edit some stuff together once a year Premiere _Pro_ is not for you. Turns out software interfaces that are meant to be used by people 8 hours a day for weeks at a time follow different design paradigms than stuff made for amateurs. I'd go completely insane if I had to edit a movie on anything simpler tho. I like their TLI ideas, but I am honestly a bit alergic against designers who lack the phantasy of realizing that sometimes a UIs complexity is a reflection of the complexity of the problem it helps to solve in conjunction with the level of control you want to give to the user. Steep learning curves should be avoided — sure — but sometimes they are necessary to shave of that extra second. Something that multiplies if you do it hundred times an hour. Premiere is like vim: not for everybody, but if you wield it in the right way, there is not much that can beat it.
- k__ 7y ago
  I learned Photoshop, Flash, Final Cut Pro, Ableton Live and multiple IDEs. I found they were, like CLIs, all very similar.
  - battery_cowboy 7y ago
    That's because they were based on the original hardware for linear video editing, which had a metric shitload of buttons and knobs you'd have to know. I could see using a minimal CLI for something like this, but it wouldn't be useful for those guys who learned on linear equipment then had to switch to the nonlinear equipment, which already had a steep learning curve since they were used to a more linear process. I don't know why the author of the article picked Premiere as an example of a "bad UI", because it is pretty close to perfect for that particular time in video editing. Source: I am experienced in several nonlinear and linear video editing technologies from the 90's and early 2000's, since my father was in the videography business.
boilerupnc 7y ago
Another great project in this space is Kui[1] - a framework for graphical terminals. It gives a hybrid command-line/UI development experience for cloud-native development. [1] https://github.com/IBM/kui https://github.com/IBM/kui
- moudy 7y ago
  nice. I've seen this with markdown previews but makes total sense to generalize
p_l 7y ago
Congratulations to repl.io team on rediscovering Symbolics Lisp Machine's Dynamic Windows / Common Lisp Interface Manager's presentation and listener systems! Not being sarcastic, even - it's a pretty powerful approach that deserves better, unfortunately distribution of knowledge in Computing Science, especially historical knowledge if you never encountered it yourself, is pretty hard.
- amasad 7y ago
  That's interesting -- thanks for sharing! I try to be as erudite in computer history as possible but I still somehow missed this. I pay homage to the Lisp community w/r/t programming interfaces in this post: https://amasad.me/disintegrated https://amasad.me/disintegrated
  - hhdave 7y ago
    Genera on the Lisp Machine is very much an embodiment of this graphical command line (or rather just command) user interface. There's quite a lot to it. CLIM (and the open source McCLIM) is the current realisation of this. There's some documentation about 'Commands' in CLIM II here for example: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lwu41/climuser/GUID_194.HTM#HEADING194-0 http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lwu41/climuser/GUID_1... Commands are first class objects which live in command tables and which CLIM can look at to generate bits of UI and allow parameters to be specified. Central to this in CLIM is the idea of presentations - where domain objects are 'presented' onto the screen and the link to the domain object is maintained. That way you can invoke a command on that object in various ways, for example you can type a command name and then click a presented object which is acceptable as a parameter. The Symbolics S-packages used these concepts to make (I presume) powerful 3d modelling programs back in the day (I haven't used them): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU - sorry for the poor video quality. https://twitter.com/rainerjoswig?lang=en https://twitter.com/rainerjoswig?lang=en (lispm on here) sometimes posts interesting things about Genera
- kalium_xyz 7y ago
  Ive been wanting to look into this forever but cant get geneva to run on my system
wrigby 7y ago
The discoverability aspect of this reminds me quite a bit of working on a Cisco IOS command line. At any point while typing a command, you can mash the ? key, and the shell will print out a list of acceptable inputs given what you've already typed (this example stolen directly from Cisco's docs[1]): Router# configure ? memory Configure from NV memory network Configure from a TFTP network host overwrite-network Overwrite NV memory from TFTP network host terminal Configure from the terminal <cr> It's really quite a great experience. 1: https://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/general/Test/dwerblo/broken_guide/cli.pdf https://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/general/Test/dwerblo/broken...
- kevin_nisbet 7y ago
  Yea, I've had it in the back of my mind to try and find or build a cisco/juniper/etc style cli lib for awhile. It's about the most efficient design I've seen for new users, where I could get a new engineer productive quickly, and for users who don't login or use the cli often, it's quick and easy to be productive quickly.
- macintux 7y ago
  I recall working on a Pix firewall, which IIRC was a product Cisco acquired from someone else and had something IOS-like, and a true Cisco IOS router more or less simultaneously. The difference in usability between the two was quite notable, exactly for that reason.
- kragen 7y ago
  In a previous life I wrote (about a third of) a system that configured routers by sending them IOS commands over telnet. It didn't seem like an improvement over SNMP to me — we configured most routers over SNMP, but couldn't for the Cisco IOS ones — but it's definitely a better way to navigate a menu tree than the traditional [1] Configure from NV memory [2] Configure from a TFTP network host [3] Overwrite NV memory from TFTP network host [0] Return to previous menu Enter your selection> | For things that don't fit well into a hierarchical tree of selections augmented with bureaucratic forms — either because it isn't obvious what category you're going to find something in (why is "Preferences" on the "Edit" menu‽) or because it involves operations on more than one object at a time, or creating objects that don't exist yet — the improvement is zero or negative. This appears even in the above example: you can get configuration data from three places and send it to two places (running-config and startup-config), but only four of the six combinations of source and destination are available. If you want to overwrite NV memory from the terminal, you first "configure terminal", and when you're done, you use a totally different command, "copy running-config startup-config", to overwrite NV memory. And there's a third unrelated command to send a configuration to your terminal, "show running-config" (or, as you would expect, "show startup-config" or for that matter "sh start".) When it comes to things like "ip route 10.2.0.0 255.255.0.0 10.1.0.2" I really don't want to be using the CLI interactively; I want to be using a text editor so that I can copy the line for 10.4.0.0/16 which goes through the same router and just change 4 to 2, and then I can diff the config with the config I'm setting on the other router and see if the differences are only the intended differences. But if I were using it interactively, it would sure be nice to be able to move the damn cursor field by field rather than character by character and see some kind of real-time indication that 10.1.0.2 is not a valid netmask if I get the order of fields wrong.
maerF0x0 7y ago
someone could improve the scalability of windows by adding better scripting options. Like how can I open 10k windows , programatically change a form input and then click the submit button? Selenium comes to mind..
l0b0 7y ago
Interesting idea. I expect it would be a hell of a lot more impactful if the demo used some well-known commands like `tar`, `find` or `grep`, though, all of which have absolutely heaps of options and complex command structures.
smitty1e 7y ago
One interface that reeks of genius is Magit[1] Taking a sprawling interface like that of git and making it work in a console window in Emacs is an idea that bears repetition across other tools, e.g. tar. Would I'd the time to work on such. [1] https://magit.vc/ https://magit.vc/
- sullyj3 7y ago
  Is there anything similar that doesn't require me to use Emacs?
  - thanatropism 7y ago
    Sublime Merge does not emphasize text input per se but allows you to type git commands with partial autocomplete/suggestions...
  - kragen 7y ago
    Not really. You can use Emacs just for Magit, though, without adopting it for things like text editing, PDF viewing, email, and Tetris.
  - Myrmornis 7y ago
    I sort of want to question what you mean exactly by "use Emacs"? Emacs is a lisp environment / UI framework for application development. So in principle saying you don't want to use an application implemented in Emacs is like saying you don't want to use an application implemented in Electron. I'm only 85% serious there, obviously Emacs has a certain amount of cruft that Electron I assume does not. You could start an emacs process just in order to use Magit -- you wouldn't have to use it for anything else. However, I totally understand that you might well not want to mess about configuring emacs to load magit and working out how to start it etc. How about these? https://github.com/vlandeiro/magit-docker https://github.com/vlandeiro/magit-docker https://github.com/akirak/nix-magit https://github.com/akirak/nix-magit
    - omaranto 7y ago
      There are some people who refuse to use applications implemented with Electron.
zenocon 7y ago
Seems to be in line with my fav Postgres tool pgcli: https://www.pgcli.com/ https://www.pgcli.com/
amasad 7y ago
Might be interesting to people here: this blog is hosted on Repl.it on a single repl/container[1] (2GB memory, 2vCPUs[2]) that's also powering IDE functions like editing, collaboration, chat, intellisense, etc. We're able to fix typos and bugs and have it live-deployed as it's serving traffic. I recorded a gif here of what it looks like from the inside: https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1235742525056380929 https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1235742525056380929 Where is the fabled "hackernews hug of death" if a tiny container can handle the traffic? :-) [1] https://repl.it/@turbio/replit-blog https://repl.it/@turbio/replit-blog [2] https://repl.it/site/pricing https://repl.it/site/pricing
- thunderbong 7y ago
  This should be upvoted more! For reference the other HN post and the comments therein - "Let’s use Kubernetes. Now you have eight problems" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22491170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22491170
- Ultimatt 7y ago
  Where do I go to add language support? Given you have BrainFuck and LOLCODE but not Perl.
  - masfrost 7y ago
    https://repl.it/perl6 https://repl.it/perl6 If that stops working it means we moved it to https://repl.it/raku https://repl.it/raku Check it out. It's not actively supported but we hope to make it official soon
    - lizmat 7y ago
      It appears to me that both Perl 6, as well as Raku, are NOT supported at repl.it (anymore)
      - raiph 7y ago
        They got the URL wrong. https://repl.it/python https://repl.it/python 404s and I rather suspect they support python. ;) https://repl.it/languages/perl6 https://repl.it/languages/perl6 and https://repl.it/languages/raku https://repl.it/languages/raku both work. :) They're both 2019.03.1 so their "raku" is presumably raku in name only. (Eg doesn't support $*RAKU etc.) Be nice to see it upgraded to a real 2020 raku.
lqs469 7y ago
This idea is so great, really like it. But I don’t know how practical it is. From the article, It improves the UI and interaction of the CLI, "That means that images, gifs, video, graphs, interactive diagrams, buttons, and forms should be able to integrate directly into the CLI experience." which may improve the user experience, But the basic mode of interaction of CLI doesn't change. The CLI experience is still not intuitive. Maybe CLI will work well for simple scenarios, but I don't know if it is a good choice for the complex circumstances. The complex interaction and graphical interface display of some industrial scenes may not be well expressed by the CLI, Even they cannot interact only through the keyboard. So I worry that CLUI will face a situation where complex circumstances are too much to handle and simple scenarios are unnecessary. Actually, there has been some CLI tool through shortcuts and custom instruction to do these things (autocomplete, fuzzy-search, tips or guidelines) with text way, They also did well.
- silentwanderer 7y ago
  I think the main value of CLUI is that it flattens the learning curve for users who don't normally use the terminal, not that it scales all the way from new users to experienced ones.
  - lqs469 7y ago
    Completely agree.
thanatropism 7y ago
Most of this research program is already realized in Windows 10, where you press the Win key and get universal search through programs, settings and files. (And unwanted Bing search results that open in Edge, but that’s Something else)
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Totally different. That only works for finding programs, not running commands in them. Windows is 15+ years behind Mac in simply implementing menu search inside programs.
dangoor 7y ago
This is cool, and it's great to see you work on this (and thanks for open sourcing!) One more bit of prior art that might be interesting to you: I worked on the Mozilla Bespin project a long time ago with Joe Walker. Joe was also really big on the command line idea for much the same reason and created [GCLI](https://github.com/joewalker/gcli/blob/master/docs/index.md https://github.com/joewalker/gcli/blob/master/docs/index.md). GCLI ultimately landed in Firefox Developer Tools, but I don't think it's in the current shipping version. Funnily enough, I just found a video on YouTube of me demoing the command line in Firefox Dev Tools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwOwJ1_JaKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwOwJ1_JaKE The state of the art in web UIs has definitely moved forward, and I'm really happy to see more experimentation with graphical command lines.
- uxamanda 7y ago
  This is great! Would love to hear more about your experience working on it if you are interested in sharing – did you notice any particular tasks where this type of interaction shined? My dream would be to have something like built into an IDE so I could save edits directly.
  - dangoor 7y ago
    As features go, this didn't prove to be super successful (it's no longer shipping with Firefox). I do still think it's a valuable interaction style for being able to activate less-frequently-used features all from the keyboard. It's possible that the fact that web browsers also have the JS Console is just too much, because the JS Console has a command line that people are familiar with. The interaction model is very different, though. GCLI made it quick to type commands, whereas the JS console requires valid JS.
    - uxamanda 7y ago
      Interesting, I could see how that could be confusing.
satya71 7y ago
This just reminded me of Emacs. There's not a whole lot of menus. All the available commands (also variables and values) can be searched and autocompleted. The initial hump is hard to get over, but after that things are so discoverable and extensible it's a pleasure. I recently switched to VS Code for creature comforts that come from a much large ecosystem and using more modern OS affordances. VS Code gets close but not quite as pleasant as Emacs.
- eequah9L 7y ago
  I wish LibreOffice, GIMP etc. had an M-x way of finding the commands, and a describe-function to ask what exactly a given command is doing. Or C-h b way of sifting through keyboard shortcuts, in just another buffer with search and everything.
  - shouyatf 7y ago
    There is a similar thing for Blender: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/40170 https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/40170
  - chootisk 7y ago
    GIMP has something similar, triggered by pressing /. I discovered it way too late, but I haven't touched a menu ever since. Libreoffice has a feature request for such a function [1]. [1]: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91874 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91874
    - eequah9L 7y ago
      Wow, thank you!
MR4D 7y ago
They should name the shell CLASH.... for Command Line Again SHell I think the idea they have is awesome. Managing servers with this would be a dream!
js2sj 7y ago
The combination of this and a ncursor app framework is much better than GUI application. Unfortunately, I don't find an active great ncursor app framework.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jancsika 7y ago
Part 1 of 4721: A GUI program in a domain that usually strains all a computer's resources, probably ought to perform within soft realtime constraints, and is aimed at professionals is complicated. Part 2 of 4721: Let us now persuade you there is a better way by demo'ing a souped-up terminal window that helps non-specialist Unix enthusiasts enter a record into a database. ??? Part 4721 of 4721: As we have clearly shown, our realtime video-editing CLUI application is more approachable, discoverable, interactive, and scalable than Adobe Premiere.
sedatk 7y ago
With the prevalence of search-driven interactions and increasing popularity of GUIfying the CLI, I feel like we are somehow converging to Oberon. I wonder how that will look like.
mayli 7y ago
So, did you ever heard the /etc/bash_completion?
29athrowaway 7y ago
I use Zenity to create interactive graphical dialogs from shell scripts.
0xCMP 7y ago
Using an iPad has inspired me to rethink things like terminal and CLUI is very close to ideas I’ve been wanting for work on for a long time. My idea originally came from using ssh on my iPad and thinking it would be cool if more native controls were used over RPC instead of text to display what was happening on the server. Then I could more easily navigate the responses and maybe even if there was more intelligent autocomplete which a UI on iOS could take advantage of. Or maybe interactive confirmations and stuff (similar to what was Demo’d). And also then provide an easy way to edit files using either a remote editor or a way to sync changes being done in a local editor. Kind of how vscode seems to do it (e.g. a remote service handling the work) The one thing a system like I’m describing would still need is the ability to switch from this rich interface back to the terminal when using things like tmux, curses, or vim/emacs because obviously those things still work well. But the cool thing was realizing that this would also be great on the desktop. Looked into some terminals like Hyper thinking maybe I could hack those up to get a proof of concept for myself, but can’t find the time. And obviously it wouldn’t work for the iPad where I really wanted it.
dreamcompiler 7y ago
This description sounds very much like CLIM, which was a graphical, clickable CLI originally designed in the early 80s for Lisp machines. (CLIM is much more than that, but building a graphical CLI is one of the things that's easy with CLIM.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp_Interface_Manager https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp_Interface_Manage...
dharmatech 7y ago
Presentation-based UI for PowerShell: https://github.com/dharmatech/PsReplWpf https://github.com/dharmatech/PsReplWpf
megapatch 7y ago
This is already implemented, modern bash offers completion and suggestions, which look exactly like shown (text only though) when you press Tab. This includes parameters, flags (with documentation), context (eg files in current directory). Autocomplete is available for most commands on modern Linux installations.
- eequah9L 7y ago
  Bash is apparently capable of showing the completions with explanations, however there doesn't seem to be a de facto standard way of doing it. Or did I miss something? Are there like libraries to help out with this, so that the help text is shown consistently? But yeah, agreed that pursuing this path would be less effort and get 90% of the way to the goal.
hawaiian 7y ago
Bash already has autocomplete and there are shells with richer feature sets. What I would like to see is something like CLUI to be integrated with an IDE or a productivity tool like Adobe Photoshop. PyCharm/JetBrains already embraces the keyboard with double-Shift => Search Everywhere, and other similar shortcuts. Similarly, Photoshop would benefit from keyboard interaction for common tasks. We already have single-pixel nudge actions via the arrow keys, but a CLI prompt you could conjure up and type into would be a game changer for actions that require repetition and precision. That is, rather than bringing GUI to the CLI, bring CLI to the GUI.
- amasad 7y ago
  Yep, that's the plan -- we're adding to our IDE. Will report back results.
- ash 7y ago
  > Bash already has autocomplete What kind of autocomplete does bash have? Do I need to enable it? I've just tried bash 5.0.16. I don't see any. For example, I've typed `pw`, but `pwd` was not suggested to me. (I know there's Tab-completion, this is not what I'm talking about. I'm looking for automatic completion. Similar to Google's search suggestions and CLUI demo.)
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Tab twice.
  - andai 7y ago
    I think fish has that?
    - ash 7y ago
      Thanks! Fish is close, but not there yet. It provides only a single autocomplete suggestion. I had to press Tab to get a list of suggestions. So: bash: no auto suggestion at all, Tab twice to see a list fish: shows single auto suggestion, Tab once to get a list zsh + zsh-autosuggestions: looks similar to fish behaviour Is there some combination of shell/plugin/terminal that provides multiple auto suggestions?
_ZeD_ 7y ago
so it's like bpython (https://bpython-interpreter.org/ https://bpython-interpreter.org/)?
justlexi93 7y ago
Unless I'm missing something this seems to just be a blog post about a prototype of an idea, and not something you can actually use.
- reportgunner 7y ago
  Yeah also they are talking about GraphQL backend so I suppose it's just a gimmick you put on your website and not an actual CLI.
time4tea 7y ago
AutoCAD amongst other software has been doing this for about 25+ years, I think. Clicky-clicky if you want, or just type in the command, same output. IntelliJ also, more recently, with its actions input.
- jfoucher 7y ago
  I absolutely loved autocad for this. One hand on the keyboard, one on the mouse is an easy way to double your productivity. The speed at which you could draw things was amazing. I had a custom alias file with most commonly used shortcuts and the enter key was bound to right click which removed the need to move your left hand over the keyboard. This was in the 2000. Sadly the more recent versions I have tried make this harder to do. If I hadn’t switched career I’d still be using autocad 2000 !
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    I use DraftSight with AutoHotkey and a Razer Naga, makes CAD work very swift!
- wiz21c 7y ago
  Yeah, spot on ! Autocad has been doing that mix of GUI and CLI for soooo loong. Example : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgz2kqm0rsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgz2kqm0rsY 20 years ago I remember seeing a person drawing mechanical plans using a lot of keyboard and just a bit of mouse. That seemed really productive.
- gioele 7y ago
  Ubuntu also tried mixing GUI and CLI in its Unity HUD [1] as part of their "intent-driven interface". The HUD retrofitted all existing menus of an application into hierarchical, searchable and "autocompletable" actions. In all applications you could press the super key (the "Windows key") and start typing what you were looking for. In my personal experience, the search functionality was extremely useful when using for the first time one a complex application such as Gimp or Libre Office. Unfortunately all extra functionalities (autocomplete, for instance) required the applications to explicitly support the HUD and few (any?) application added the necessary code once GNOME 3 appeared. [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/HUD https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/HUD
fit2rule 7y ago
I regularly use a pretty GUI-intense program, called REAPER, for editing digital audio. Its a very powerful application, full of amazing features and powerful yet simple tools. Its a bit daunting at first, and can be overwhelming if you don't really have the patience to dig into it and find where everything is, in terms of grouped functionality. However, one key thing made learning to use REAPER smooth as butter - the '?' key. This shows the "Action List", which is a list of all the things you can do in REAPER, in a text list .. so I can quickly type '?' - then 'section' and find all the actions related to sections. VERY useful, and quite a great way to explore the periphery of features I would otherwise not have discovered. In fact, its the very first thing I teach anyone I'm introducing to REAPER, that they should use. I'd say, without this "text-based UI", the rest of the program wouldn't be nearly as accessible. A lot of that has to do with the fact that the REAPER developer seems to have a Power > Eye-candy attitude about the UI design - its clean, minimal, and functional when you first get started - but the UI is also fully tweak-able such that once you start getting productive with it, you find ways to make the GUI really shine (track colours, Layout customisations, etc.) Anyway, I think its pretty interesting that the entire UI is accessible from the text-based '?' Action list query... I wish more programs would adopt this abstraction.
pault 7y ago
The help > search menu is the thing I miss the most from Mac OS since I switched to windows. Especially in programs like Photoshop where there are dozens of nested dropdowns, hitting cmd + ?, typing a few characters, and hitting enter is such a huge boost to productivity when you haven't memorized all of the keyboard shortcuts, and it even works on menu items that don't have a shortcut. The Microsoft office suite has this functionality as well, and I really wish they would integrate it at the system level like Mac OS does.
- uxamanda 7y ago
  Agreed, love this feature and use it often. I wish it saved the last few searches to quickly access commonly searched items.
roryrjb 7y ago
I don't agree that GUIs are a replacement for the CLI. Yes in the past that is all we had, but really they are completely different and should be considered in parallel. CLIs were never really meant for non-technical users though as far as I'm aware, or at least the end user was already expected to have some kind of established context. I'm not really against exploration in this area but I disagree that CLIs are flawed. I'm biased of course, excuse me while I get back to my UNIX/xterm/tmux/vim development environment. EDIT: I would like to point out that I've only been in the industry for 6/7 years so it's not like I started my career where this established environment was the only choice.
johnlorentzson 7y ago
This reminds me a bit of the Dynamic Lisp Listener from Symbolics Genera-based Lisp machines.
InfinityByTen 7y ago
I wouldn't take this article to be a be all, end all. It's quite thought provoking for me personally. The reason I switched from bash to zsh was simply the UI like interface in path completion with OhMyZsh. The reason sublime works quite well for me is that there are tabs that I love to move around and see at the same time and I like the visual feedback of moving things around and switching contexts. But if I want to do something quickly.. I can easily find the command for from a simple keyboard shortcut. I think this idea can be refined further and made more and more robust and is a design pattern in the right direction. With more and more percentage of the population heading in coding-friendly direction I see this as a very viable next step.
longtermd 7y ago
Implementing a working and fast CLUI (as a search feature) was one of the easiest ways to get a real WOW-effect from our customers. /founder here think of: the website (and search results) updates in realtime with every letter you type
momokoko 7y ago
So, upterm[0] / hyper-autocomplete[1]? [0] https://github.com/railsware/upterm https://github.com/railsware/upterm [1] https://github.com/Inlustra/hyper-autocomplete https://github.com/Inlustra/hyper-autocomplete
tie_ 7y ago
The article describes pretty much what SAWS has implemented - https://github.com/donnemartin/saws https://github.com/donnemartin/saws (mad props to ~donnemartin for the implementation!)
screenbeard 7y ago
I was with you for the first half, until the demo of the command completion with clickable dropdown options and thought it looked just like the nested menus you're trying to kill. The difference is a slightly less cluttered interface, but for someone who knows what they're looking at is a menu all that different than selecting a command that gives a subset of followup commands on a single line?
- Sammi 7y ago
  The article addresses this: "Because the tree is hierarchical, you might think that it actually resembles a large dropdown menu. The difference is that search is built directly into its navigation, not just pointing and clicking. One clear improvement that could be made is being able to search for any subcommand without having to specify its parent command first. That way you can access any deeply nested information instantly, similar to spotlight search."
Razengan 7y ago
The examples look really cool. I'd like to add a sort of wish I have for such a "smart CLI": Being able to preview the effect of the command(s) you're currently typing, like the files/directories it's going to modify, whether it's going to change something for the entire system or specific users. Something like that would lower the intimidation factor for beginners even further.
miki123211 7y ago
This is what Microsoft Office has been doing for the past few years. For those unfamiliar, modern Office versions use ribbons instead of menus. Ribbons have a few tabs like home, layout etc. The tabs change depending on what object you're interacting with, so i.e. if you're editing a pivot table in Excel, you get two new tabs for working with pivot tables. That means you only see the options that are actually relevant to you. Each tab has buttons separated into groups. So, there might be a "alignment" group with "left", "center", "right" and "justify" inside. Most buttons have detailed descriptions of what they do and multi-layered, visible keyboard shortcuts that activate them quickly. Some even have an additional drop down for more options, so i.e. the "view" button in Access might switch you between the two most common views when clicked, but you can expand it and select a different view if need be. The latest office versions also have a search field that allows you to find any command, no matter what tab it is in. It has autocomplete, so typing piv usually shows you "pivot table" as one of the first suggestions. I use Excel and Access pretty often, and do some moderately complex things with them, but I almost don't use the traditional ribbon at all. I use shortcuts for the commands I need very often, and search for the rest. If I don't know how something is called, I go through the commands on the relevant tabs and find it eventually. I think this kind of UI scales pretty well. MS Office apps are pretty complicated and packed with features, especially the pro versions, but I think that UI paradigm is pretty scalable and nice for users.
- s_gourichon 7y ago
  What follows is only partly related to the overall conversation, rather an answer to the ribbon episode. The ribbon in MS Office came along roughly at the same time as 16:9 and 16:10 screens (on laptops in my memories anyway). Already on a 4:3 screen, WYSIWYG editing wastes much space on left and right of the screen, to show paper margins and page limits. And that goddamned ribbon eats up all the top of the screen, making you see only a limited band of what you could see on that very screen. Had no one the idea to make the ribbon a vertical tool bar on the left or right, like in Photoshop/Gimp and a number of other tools? Such a feeling of UI failure at the time. At that moment my computers were already all running Linux anyway, so I've never used it more than a few times on a coworker's machine. Now I no longer use WYSIWYG software. Text editing with the WYSIWYG paradigm feels superficially seducing, until you realize it actually hides the actual document content. How many times has Word shown some items in a bullet list with a different size without any visible reason ? Or in Google docs one bullet horizontally misaligned? Why? No one knows. When editing text, seeing how the final document would look like is not that important. It's more important to know the state of what you're editing. With markdown or asciidoc what you see it what your document actually contains. On top of that, WYSIWIG assumes that there is one final document appearance, which is just not true for a digital document in a digital world that could be rendered countless ways in different styles (unless your workflow targets documents in try-to-mimick-paper-form, like PDF, until that changes).
m4r35n357 7y ago
It isn't a command line "interface", it is a command line "interpreter". If you don't know this you have lost at the start. I'll stick to my shell, thanks!
ailideex 7y ago
I am quite annoyed with text user interfaces, especially in lui of a proper CLI. On two occasions that I asked people to make a CLI for something and then they made some abomination that can't be used from a script but needs to be used interactively.
ratel 7y ago
I think it is an interesting idea that needs some further exploration. I do see some problems with it that were not addressed. The way the demos are setup are by definition an NP!=P problem. It is easy to verify you found the right command, but may be fiendishly difficult to navigate the tree to get there. Menus with sub-menus having sub-menus at least makes it visually clear which paths you have not taken and allow retracing your steps. Something akin to Ctrl-R in shells may be needed to allow you to type certain keywords to find all possible actions. Options and parameters are not part of a decision tree as they don't specify a logical action that will follow, they just change the action. Those parameters need evaluating the entire progress in the tree to be able to suggest a next available parameter, option and action. Try it with something like ffmpeg. Modelling this to work in a CLUI will evolve into a hard problem very quickly. The more actions, options, parameters I add as a user the more important it becomes that I can backtrack and correct mistakes. Corrections may or may not have consequences for the position in the tree I already choose. Starting over even from there might not be the right solution in terms of usability if the correction does not necessitate it.
_pmf_ 7y ago
Matlab, Mathematica et. al. are used by tens of thousands of people daily. You have several decades of catch up to get anything resembling feature parity.
lonelappde 7y ago
They mock standard OS tree menus and then advertise their...tree menus, and justify it by saying theirs have search, ignoring that OS tree menus also have search
talkingtab 7y ago
Cool thinking. And thought provoking. I find myself increasingly being annoyed by GUI's with their rich interfaces. An interesting project is lazygit which uses gocui. For me it is useful and appealing alternative to the command line git. With each pane you press a meta key to get list of commands for the pane, and it would be interesting to see a mash up with replit somehow.
zeveb 7y ago
They've got some great ideas and insight here. The thing is, there already is a wonderful two-dimensional, general-purpose, interactive terminal/graphic interface: it's Emacs. And it really is awesome! I think this is a corollary to Greenspun's Tenth Rule ('Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp'): any sufficiently powerful UI will be an ad-hoc, inextensible, inconsistent, weaker version of Emacs.
gitgud 7y ago
> "On a technical level, a CLUI command is conceptually similar to a file path or URL. Since a complete CLUI command is simply a path down the command tree, each potential subcommand is like a portion of a file path or URL." Sounds like walking the tree of a REST api... potential CLUI framework for REST?
elagost 7y ago
It's been more than 5 years since I've used AutoCAD or other AutoDesk professional design software, but it has this. There's a command line that interfaces very well with its GUI. You can draw shapes entirely in the command line, or you can use it to help you place a second point in a line, for example.
hereisdx 7y ago
Hey! I wrote this command in a GUI CLI!
highmastdon 7y ago
This reminds me of what fish [1] (friendly interactive shell) brings for me. Together with z for directory jumping [2] and fzf for interactive lists [3] there's really no need for a "finder" or "explorer". Aside from it I've run into Xiki [4] that seems to bridge the gap on multiple levels between GUI and CLI. GUI to bring the discoverability and CLI to keep it scalable. [1] https://fishshell.com/ https://fishshell.com/ [2] https://github.com/jethrokuan/z https://github.com/jethrokuan/z [3] https://github.com/jethrokuan/fzf https://github.com/jethrokuan/fzf [4] https://xiki.org/ https://xiki.org/
lapinot 7y ago
I really like the general idea of bridging the gap between graphical and text-based interfaces, abstracting away the differences and be able to use a mixture of both. In the realm of interactive programming (eg heavily ide assisted), people with some functional and statically typed programming background would be interested in this magnificent talk about idris2: [Edwin Brady - Idris 2 - Type-driven Development of Idris] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRq2NgeFcO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRq2NgeFcO0
nojvek 7y ago
Bashing premier pro is a low blow. It’s a very powerful tool that really can’t be replicated in Cli. Even using ffmpeg CLI is a painful experience. That being said code completion, contextual help and form-ish guis give a better user experience. The most used UI element is a button and thereafter is the search input.
timka 7y ago
How come noone mentioned Aza Raskin's Ubiquity? This is HN after all!

596 points by amasad 7y ago

I never used it a great deal, but I had the impression that MPW (Macintosh Programmers' Workshop) was an evolution of the command line that unfortunately didn't really catch on.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

Waterluvian 7y ago

This might be what they're getting at. Discoverability with the basic Python repl is bad. You can use help and dir and both are clunky. But install ipython and you're off to the races with autocomplete menus you can arrow key through.

mixmastamyk 7y ago
ptpython is great at that also and probably easier to grok at first. The fish shell does much of this as well but is not as attractive.

tenaciousDaniel 7y ago

This is really cool. I'm actually building a coding language for UI designers, and a UI like this would be super helpful.

moudy 7y ago
that sounds interesting. do you have anything you can share?
- tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
  Not yet, but hopefully I'll have something simple to show in the next few months.

iovrthoughtthis 7y ago

This is great and a very powerful technique. Are there any things like this that provide similar interfaces for OSs?

khimaros 7y ago
Requires a bit of initial setup, but possible it's what you're looking for: https://github.com/denisidoro/navi https://github.com/denisidoro/navi Also, at least some of the scaffolding for CLUI seems to be available at https://github.com/replit/clui https://github.com/replit/clui

syrusakbary 7y ago

This is awesome! <3 I think the technique of creating UI forms based on GraphQL metadata is going to be key for building the admin tools of the future.

microcolonel 7y ago

Most of the tools to do this exist in ordinary terminal emulators, with ordinary shells. This would be interesting as an extension for Fish or similar. AFAIK (somewhat) typed auto-complete information is already available for a lot of commands.

flyinglizard 7y ago

Last year I made a bulk photo management software using this exact UI pattern. It’s very effective.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dreary_dugong 7y ago

While I agree wholeheartedly with the stated goals, I do worry that the CLUI isn't quite as perfect s solution as it's implied to be. The CLUI is listed as having all of the upsides of both GUI and CLI but none of the downsides of either, but I feel it's more like halfway on everything. It's /more/ approachable than a CLI, but still /less/ approachable than a GUI and this goes for most of the categories listed. It's still an interesting idea but it strikes me as a bit risky. At what point does less approachable become too unapproachable? I fear CLUI may have accidentally gained many of the downsides at the same time as mere pieces of the upsides

airstrike 7y ago
I agree. It feels like an improvement over the very limited interaction from a plain CLI, but it isn't foolproof. The user still needs to know e.g. whether the right way to set an user's role is through 'admin roles' or 'admin user'
- tangert 7y ago
  replit designer here - yes, totally agree. the current implementation definitely is not foolproof, but it's just the start. ideally it will handle more unstructured commands in the future!
  - airstrike 7y ago
    For the avoidance of doubt: I think this is awesome! Keep up the good work!
    - tangert 7y ago
      thank you :)
tangert 7y ago
interesting point. luckily we're testing it in a pretty sandboxed environment so it's not going to overtake replit all at once. I think the power will come from integrating CLUI seamlessly into the parts of GUIs people are really accustomed to. luckily all the questions you raise are totally testable and will be a part of our research process :)

carapace 7y ago

> On a technical level, a CLUI command is conceptually similar to a file path or URL. Since a complete CLUI command is simply a path down the command tree, each potential subcommand is like a portion of a file path or URL. Flags, on the other hand, function like query parameters. CLUI’s resemblance to URL paths means you can send someone a complete, executable CLUI command as a URL. They’re mapped 1:1. This is really cool. > Since we have a GraphQL backend, we know all the potential fields and arguments a client can use. By using an introspection query we generate a tree of commands/sub-commands that map onto their respective resolve functions. Now, to add a new admin command all that's needed is a new field on a GraphQL type. And that's really really cool. The main thing I see that could be improved would be a clear, simple underlying model or metaphor, a semantic layer that sits between the CLUI and the GraphQL backend, to unify and simplify the various contexts and languages and runtimes and whatever. I've been toying with a UI demo that unifies GUI and CLI through a dialect of the Joy language. Everything you can do at the CLI can be done through the mouse, and everything done through the mouse has a corresponding textual representation as Joy code. It's inspired by Oberon OS and Jef Raskin's "Humane Interface" (among other influences.) I haven't integrated widgets (yet) because you mostly don't need them, mostly. W/O getting into a lot of details, there are no menus nor buttons because any text can be used to activate any command and/or enter any data; there are no forms because the UI metaphor (Joy) is stack-based so you just put values onto the stack; and so on.

asiachick 7y ago
Autodesk Maya has always been both CLI and GUI based. Every GUI interaction generates a visible CLI command you could have typed to accomplish the same thing. It’s been the way since PowerAnimator in the 90s
- kragen 7y ago
  I think AutoCAD has been this way for a long time too. The first version I used was 2.14K+ADE; you could invoke any operation from the keyboard (and often had to) but I don't remember if selecting from menus with the mouse would generate the CLI command. In later versions of AutoCAD it did.

Someone 7y ago

Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop had something similar in 1986 (http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/tools/mpw-tools/commandref/commando.html http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/too...). It was incredibly useful. Apple’s first Unix copied that in 1988 (http://toastytech.com/guis/aux3.html http://toastytech.com/guis/aux3.html) Powershell has ‘Show-Command’ which also is similar (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/show-command?view=powershell-7 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...) I think PowerShell generates the GUI, while MPW commando had human-designed dialogs (and, for complex commands such as compilers, sub-dialogs) I think this is worth copying in modern Unixes. Those GUIs make it way easier to use rarely used flags than man pages.

jayd16 7y ago
Powershell ISE has intellisense too. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/components/ise/introducing-the-windows-powershell-ise?view=powershell-7 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/compon...
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Visual Studio Code has replaced ISE.
  - jayd16 7y ago
    How do I get intellisense in the VSC terminal? Best I can figure out is I have to make a file and run that.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Not sure what you mean, it does do completion just like the regular Powershell terminal window.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
Such a shame AUX was abandoned.

atoav 7y ago

As somebody who worked professionally with Adobe Premiere I think the criticism of its UI misses the point. Premiere was never meant for hobbyists (reflected by it's actual name: Premiere _Pro_). The only valid point made here is that it is hard to learn for someone who never used any editing software at all. But it certainly isn't slow or "unfocused". That source monitor is on screen for a reason. Keyboard shortcuts will always be faster than moving your mouse around. And by the way: Premiere has a modular interface, so if you hate the clutter or don't need it, you can get rid of it. If you are the person who just wants to edit some stuff together once a year Premiere _Pro_ is not for you. Turns out software interfaces that are meant to be used by people 8 hours a day for weeks at a time follow different design paradigms than stuff made for amateurs. I'd go completely insane if I had to edit a movie on anything simpler tho. I like their TLI ideas, but I am honestly a bit alergic against designers who lack the phantasy of realizing that sometimes a UIs complexity is a reflection of the complexity of the problem it helps to solve in conjunction with the level of control you want to give to the user. Steep learning curves should be avoided — sure — but sometimes they are necessary to shave of that extra second. Something that multiplies if you do it hundred times an hour. Premiere is like vim: not for everybody, but if you wield it in the right way, there is not much that can beat it.

k__ 7y ago
I learned Photoshop, Flash, Final Cut Pro, Ableton Live and multiple IDEs. I found they were, like CLIs, all very similar.
- battery_cowboy 7y ago
  That's because they were based on the original hardware for linear video editing, which had a metric shitload of buttons and knobs you'd have to know. I could see using a minimal CLI for something like this, but it wouldn't be useful for those guys who learned on linear equipment then had to switch to the nonlinear equipment, which already had a steep learning curve since they were used to a more linear process. I don't know why the author of the article picked Premiere as an example of a "bad UI", because it is pretty close to perfect for that particular time in video editing. Source: I am experienced in several nonlinear and linear video editing technologies from the 90's and early 2000's, since my father was in the videography business.

boilerupnc 7y ago

Another great project in this space is Kui[1] - a framework for graphical terminals. It gives a hybrid command-line/UI development experience for cloud-native development. [1] https://github.com/IBM/kui https://github.com/IBM/kui

moudy 7y ago
nice. I've seen this with markdown previews but makes total sense to generalize

p_l 7y ago

Congratulations to repl.io team on rediscovering Symbolics Lisp Machine's Dynamic Windows / Common Lisp Interface Manager's presentation and listener systems! Not being sarcastic, even - it's a pretty powerful approach that deserves better, unfortunately distribution of knowledge in Computing Science, especially historical knowledge if you never encountered it yourself, is pretty hard.

amasad 7y ago
That's interesting -- thanks for sharing! I try to be as erudite in computer history as possible but I still somehow missed this. I pay homage to the Lisp community w/r/t programming interfaces in this post: https://amasad.me/disintegrated https://amasad.me/disintegrated
- hhdave 7y ago
  Genera on the Lisp Machine is very much an embodiment of this graphical command line (or rather just command) user interface. There's quite a lot to it. CLIM (and the open source McCLIM) is the current realisation of this. There's some documentation about 'Commands' in CLIM II here for example: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lwu41/climuser/GUID_194.HTM#HEADING194-0 http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lwu41/climuser/GUID_1... Commands are first class objects which live in command tables and which CLIM can look at to generate bits of UI and allow parameters to be specified. Central to this in CLIM is the idea of presentations - where domain objects are 'presented' onto the screen and the link to the domain object is maintained. That way you can invoke a command on that object in various ways, for example you can type a command name and then click a presented object which is acceptable as a parameter. The Symbolics S-packages used these concepts to make (I presume) powerful 3d modelling programs back in the day (I haven't used them): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU - sorry for the poor video quality. https://twitter.com/rainerjoswig?lang=en https://twitter.com/rainerjoswig?lang=en (lispm on here) sometimes posts interesting things about Genera
kalium_xyz 7y ago
Ive been wanting to look into this forever but cant get geneva to run on my system

wrigby 7y ago

The discoverability aspect of this reminds me quite a bit of working on a Cisco IOS command line. At any point while typing a command, you can mash the ? key, and the shell will print out a list of acceptable inputs given what you've already typed (this example stolen directly from Cisco's docs[1]): Router# configure ? memory Configure from NV memory network Configure from a TFTP network host overwrite-network Overwrite NV memory from TFTP network host terminal Configure from the terminal <cr> It's really quite a great experience. 1: https://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/general/Test/dwerblo/broken_guide/cli.pdf https://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/general/Test/dwerblo/broken...

kevin_nisbet 7y ago
Yea, I've had it in the back of my mind to try and find or build a cisco/juniper/etc style cli lib for awhile. It's about the most efficient design I've seen for new users, where I could get a new engineer productive quickly, and for users who don't login or use the cli often, it's quick and easy to be productive quickly.
macintux 7y ago
I recall working on a Pix firewall, which IIRC was a product Cisco acquired from someone else and had something IOS-like, and a true Cisco IOS router more or less simultaneously. The difference in usability between the two was quite notable, exactly for that reason.
kragen 7y ago
In a previous life I wrote (about a third of) a system that configured routers by sending them IOS commands over telnet. It didn't seem like an improvement over SNMP to me — we configured most routers over SNMP, but couldn't for the Cisco IOS ones — but it's definitely a better way to navigate a menu tree than the traditional [1] Configure from NV memory [2] Configure from a TFTP network host [3] Overwrite NV memory from TFTP network host [0] Return to previous menu Enter your selection> | For things that don't fit well into a hierarchical tree of selections augmented with bureaucratic forms — either because it isn't obvious what category you're going to find something in (why is "Preferences" on the "Edit" menu‽) or because it involves operations on more than one object at a time, or creating objects that don't exist yet — the improvement is zero or negative. This appears even in the above example: you can get configuration data from three places and send it to two places (running-config and startup-config), but only four of the six combinations of source and destination are available. If you want to overwrite NV memory from the terminal, you first "configure terminal", and when you're done, you use a totally different command, "copy running-config startup-config", to overwrite NV memory. And there's a third unrelated command to send a configuration to your terminal, "show running-config" (or, as you would expect, "show startup-config" or for that matter "sh start".) When it comes to things like "ip route 10.2.0.0 255.255.0.0 10.1.0.2" I really don't want to be using the CLI interactively; I want to be using a text editor so that I can copy the line for 10.4.0.0/16 which goes through the same router and just change 4 to 2, and then I can diff the config with the config I'm setting on the other router and see if the differences are only the intended differences. But if I were using it interactively, it would sure be nice to be able to move the damn cursor field by field rather than character by character and see some kind of real-time indication that 10.1.0.2 is not a valid netmask if I get the order of fields wrong.

maerF0x0 7y ago

someone could improve the scalability of windows by adding better scripting options. Like how can I open 10k windows , programatically change a form input and then click the submit button? Selenium comes to mind..

l0b0 7y ago

Interesting idea. I expect it would be a hell of a lot more impactful if the demo used some well-known commands like `tar`, `find` or `grep`, though, all of which have absolutely heaps of options and complex command structures.

smitty1e 7y ago

One interface that reeks of genius is Magit[1] Taking a sprawling interface like that of git and making it work in a console window in Emacs is an idea that bears repetition across other tools, e.g. tar. Would I'd the time to work on such. [1] https://magit.vc/ https://magit.vc/

sullyj3 7y ago
Is there anything similar that doesn't require me to use Emacs?
- thanatropism 7y ago
  Sublime Merge does not emphasize text input per se but allows you to type git commands with partial autocomplete/suggestions...
- kragen 7y ago
  Not really. You can use Emacs just for Magit, though, without adopting it for things like text editing, PDF viewing, email, and Tetris.
- Myrmornis 7y ago
  I sort of want to question what you mean exactly by "use Emacs"? Emacs is a lisp environment / UI framework for application development. So in principle saying you don't want to use an application implemented in Emacs is like saying you don't want to use an application implemented in Electron. I'm only 85% serious there, obviously Emacs has a certain amount of cruft that Electron I assume does not. You could start an emacs process just in order to use Magit -- you wouldn't have to use it for anything else. However, I totally understand that you might well not want to mess about configuring emacs to load magit and working out how to start it etc. How about these? https://github.com/vlandeiro/magit-docker https://github.com/vlandeiro/magit-docker https://github.com/akirak/nix-magit https://github.com/akirak/nix-magit
  - omaranto 7y ago
    There are some people who refuse to use applications implemented with Electron.

zenocon 7y ago

Seems to be in line with my fav Postgres tool pgcli: https://www.pgcli.com/ https://www.pgcli.com/

amasad 7y ago

Might be interesting to people here: this blog is hosted on Repl.it on a single repl/container[1] (2GB memory, 2vCPUs[2]) that's also powering IDE functions like editing, collaboration, chat, intellisense, etc. We're able to fix typos and bugs and have it live-deployed as it's serving traffic. I recorded a gif here of what it looks like from the inside: https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1235742525056380929 https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1235742525056380929 Where is the fabled "hackernews hug of death" if a tiny container can handle the traffic? :-) [1] https://repl.it/@turbio/replit-blog https://repl.it/@turbio/replit-blog [2] https://repl.it/site/pricing https://repl.it/site/pricing

thunderbong 7y ago
This should be upvoted more! For reference the other HN post and the comments therein - "Let’s use Kubernetes. Now you have eight problems" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22491170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22491170
Ultimatt 7y ago
Where do I go to add language support? Given you have BrainFuck and LOLCODE but not Perl.
- masfrost 7y ago
  https://repl.it/perl6 https://repl.it/perl6 If that stops working it means we moved it to https://repl.it/raku https://repl.it/raku Check it out. It's not actively supported but we hope to make it official soon
  - lizmat 7y ago
    It appears to me that both Perl 6, as well as Raku, are NOT supported at repl.it (anymore)
    - raiph 7y ago
      They got the URL wrong. https://repl.it/python https://repl.it/python 404s and I rather suspect they support python. ;) https://repl.it/languages/perl6 https://repl.it/languages/perl6 and https://repl.it/languages/raku https://repl.it/languages/raku both work. :) They're both 2019.03.1 so their "raku" is presumably raku in name only. (Eg doesn't support $*RAKU etc.) Be nice to see it upgraded to a real 2020 raku.

lqs469 7y ago

This idea is so great, really like it. But I don’t know how practical it is. From the article, It improves the UI and interaction of the CLI, "That means that images, gifs, video, graphs, interactive diagrams, buttons, and forms should be able to integrate directly into the CLI experience." which may improve the user experience, But the basic mode of interaction of CLI doesn't change. The CLI experience is still not intuitive. Maybe CLI will work well for simple scenarios, but I don't know if it is a good choice for the complex circumstances. The complex interaction and graphical interface display of some industrial scenes may not be well expressed by the CLI, Even they cannot interact only through the keyboard. So I worry that CLUI will face a situation where complex circumstances are too much to handle and simple scenarios are unnecessary. Actually, there has been some CLI tool through shortcuts and custom instruction to do these things (autocomplete, fuzzy-search, tips or guidelines) with text way, They also did well.

silentwanderer 7y ago
I think the main value of CLUI is that it flattens the learning curve for users who don't normally use the terminal, not that it scales all the way from new users to experienced ones.
- lqs469 7y ago
  Completely agree.

thanatropism 7y ago

Most of this research program is already realized in Windows 10, where you press the Win key and get universal search through programs, settings and files. (And unwanted Bing search results that open in Edge, but that’s Something else)

lonelappde 7y ago
Totally different. That only works for finding programs, not running commands in them. Windows is 15+ years behind Mac in simply implementing menu search inside programs.

dangoor 7y ago

This is cool, and it's great to see you work on this (and thanks for open sourcing!) One more bit of prior art that might be interesting to you: I worked on the Mozilla Bespin project a long time ago with Joe Walker. Joe was also really big on the command line idea for much the same reason and created [GCLI](https://github.com/joewalker/gcli/blob/master/docs/index.md https://github.com/joewalker/gcli/blob/master/docs/index.md). GCLI ultimately landed in Firefox Developer Tools, but I don't think it's in the current shipping version. Funnily enough, I just found a video on YouTube of me demoing the command line in Firefox Dev Tools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwOwJ1_JaKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwOwJ1_JaKE The state of the art in web UIs has definitely moved forward, and I'm really happy to see more experimentation with graphical command lines.

uxamanda 7y ago
This is great! Would love to hear more about your experience working on it if you are interested in sharing – did you notice any particular tasks where this type of interaction shined? My dream would be to have something like built into an IDE so I could save edits directly.
- dangoor 7y ago
  As features go, this didn't prove to be super successful (it's no longer shipping with Firefox). I do still think it's a valuable interaction style for being able to activate less-frequently-used features all from the keyboard. It's possible that the fact that web browsers also have the JS Console is just too much, because the JS Console has a command line that people are familiar with. The interaction model is very different, though. GCLI made it quick to type commands, whereas the JS console requires valid JS.
  - uxamanda 7y ago
    Interesting, I could see how that could be confusing.

satya71 7y ago

This just reminded me of Emacs. There's not a whole lot of menus. All the available commands (also variables and values) can be searched and autocompleted. The initial hump is hard to get over, but after that things are so discoverable and extensible it's a pleasure. I recently switched to VS Code for creature comforts that come from a much large ecosystem and using more modern OS affordances. VS Code gets close but not quite as pleasant as Emacs.

eequah9L 7y ago
I wish LibreOffice, GIMP etc. had an M-x way of finding the commands, and a describe-function to ask what exactly a given command is doing. Or C-h b way of sifting through keyboard shortcuts, in just another buffer with search and everything.
- shouyatf 7y ago
  There is a similar thing for Blender: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/40170 https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/40170
- chootisk 7y ago
  GIMP has something similar, triggered by pressing /. I discovered it way too late, but I haven't touched a menu ever since. Libreoffice has a feature request for such a function [1]. [1]: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91874 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91874
  - eequah9L 7y ago
    Wow, thank you!

MR4D 7y ago

They should name the shell CLASH.... for Command Line Again SHell I think the idea they have is awesome. Managing servers with this would be a dream!

js2sj 7y ago

The combination of this and a ncursor app framework is much better than GUI application. Unfortunately, I don't find an active great ncursor app framework.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jancsika 7y ago

Part 1 of 4721: A GUI program in a domain that usually strains all a computer's resources, probably ought to perform within soft realtime constraints, and is aimed at professionals is complicated. Part 2 of 4721: Let us now persuade you there is a better way by demo'ing a souped-up terminal window that helps non-specialist Unix enthusiasts enter a record into a database. ??? Part 4721 of 4721: As we have clearly shown, our realtime video-editing CLUI application is more approachable, discoverable, interactive, and scalable than Adobe Premiere.

sedatk 7y ago

With the prevalence of search-driven interactions and increasing popularity of GUIfying the CLI, I feel like we are somehow converging to Oberon. I wonder how that will look like.

mayli 7y ago

So, did you ever heard the /etc/bash_completion?

29athrowaway 7y ago

I use Zenity to create interactive graphical dialogs from shell scripts.

0xCMP 7y ago

Using an iPad has inspired me to rethink things like terminal and CLUI is very close to ideas I’ve been wanting for work on for a long time. My idea originally came from using ssh on my iPad and thinking it would be cool if more native controls were used over RPC instead of text to display what was happening on the server. Then I could more easily navigate the responses and maybe even if there was more intelligent autocomplete which a UI on iOS could take advantage of. Or maybe interactive confirmations and stuff (similar to what was Demo’d). And also then provide an easy way to edit files using either a remote editor or a way to sync changes being done in a local editor. Kind of how vscode seems to do it (e.g. a remote service handling the work) The one thing a system like I’m describing would still need is the ability to switch from this rich interface back to the terminal when using things like tmux, curses, or vim/emacs because obviously those things still work well. But the cool thing was realizing that this would also be great on the desktop. Looked into some terminals like Hyper thinking maybe I could hack those up to get a proof of concept for myself, but can’t find the time. And obviously it wouldn’t work for the iPad where I really wanted it.

dreamcompiler 7y ago

This description sounds very much like CLIM, which was a graphical, clickable CLI originally designed in the early 80s for Lisp machines. (CLIM is much more than that, but building a graphical CLI is one of the things that's easy with CLIM.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp_Interface_Manager https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp_Interface_Manage...

dharmatech 7y ago

Presentation-based UI for PowerShell: https://github.com/dharmatech/PsReplWpf https://github.com/dharmatech/PsReplWpf

megapatch 7y ago

This is already implemented, modern bash offers completion and suggestions, which look exactly like shown (text only though) when you press Tab. This includes parameters, flags (with documentation), context (eg files in current directory). Autocomplete is available for most commands on modern Linux installations.

eequah9L 7y ago
Bash is apparently capable of showing the completions with explanations, however there doesn't seem to be a de facto standard way of doing it. Or did I miss something? Are there like libraries to help out with this, so that the help text is shown consistently? But yeah, agreed that pursuing this path would be less effort and get 90% of the way to the goal.

hawaiian 7y ago

Bash already has autocomplete and there are shells with richer feature sets. What I would like to see is something like CLUI to be integrated with an IDE or a productivity tool like Adobe Photoshop. PyCharm/JetBrains already embraces the keyboard with double-Shift => Search Everywhere, and other similar shortcuts. Similarly, Photoshop would benefit from keyboard interaction for common tasks. We already have single-pixel nudge actions via the arrow keys, but a CLI prompt you could conjure up and type into would be a game changer for actions that require repetition and precision. That is, rather than bringing GUI to the CLI, bring CLI to the GUI.

amasad 7y ago
Yep, that's the plan -- we're adding to our IDE. Will report back results.
ash 7y ago
> Bash already has autocomplete What kind of autocomplete does bash have? Do I need to enable it? I've just tried bash 5.0.16. I don't see any. For example, I've typed `pw`, but `pwd` was not suggested to me. (I know there's Tab-completion, this is not what I'm talking about. I'm looking for automatic completion. Similar to Google's search suggestions and CLUI demo.)
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Tab twice.
- andai 7y ago
  I think fish has that?
  - ash 7y ago
    Thanks! Fish is close, but not there yet. It provides only a single autocomplete suggestion. I had to press Tab to get a list of suggestions. So: bash: no auto suggestion at all, Tab twice to see a list fish: shows single auto suggestion, Tab once to get a list zsh + zsh-autosuggestions: looks similar to fish behaviour Is there some combination of shell/plugin/terminal that provides multiple auto suggestions?

_ZeD_ 7y ago

so it's like bpython (https://bpython-interpreter.org/ https://bpython-interpreter.org/)?

justlexi93 7y ago

Unless I'm missing something this seems to just be a blog post about a prototype of an idea, and not something you can actually use.

reportgunner 7y ago
Yeah also they are talking about GraphQL backend so I suppose it's just a gimmick you put on your website and not an actual CLI.

time4tea 7y ago

AutoCAD amongst other software has been doing this for about 25+ years, I think. Clicky-clicky if you want, or just type in the command, same output. IntelliJ also, more recently, with its actions input.

jfoucher 7y ago
I absolutely loved autocad for this. One hand on the keyboard, one on the mouse is an easy way to double your productivity. The speed at which you could draw things was amazing. I had a custom alias file with most commonly used shortcuts and the enter key was bound to right click which removed the need to move your left hand over the keyboard. This was in the 2000. Sadly the more recent versions I have tried make this harder to do. If I hadn’t switched career I’d still be using autocad 2000 !
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  I use DraftSight with AutoHotkey and a Razer Naga, makes CAD work very swift!
wiz21c 7y ago
Yeah, spot on ! Autocad has been doing that mix of GUI and CLI for soooo loong. Example : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgz2kqm0rsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgz2kqm0rsY 20 years ago I remember seeing a person drawing mechanical plans using a lot of keyboard and just a bit of mouse. That seemed really productive.
gioele 7y ago
Ubuntu also tried mixing GUI and CLI in its Unity HUD [1] as part of their "intent-driven interface". The HUD retrofitted all existing menus of an application into hierarchical, searchable and "autocompletable" actions. In all applications you could press the super key (the "Windows key") and start typing what you were looking for. In my personal experience, the search functionality was extremely useful when using for the first time one a complex application such as Gimp or Libre Office. Unfortunately all extra functionalities (autocomplete, for instance) required the applications to explicitly support the HUD and few (any?) application added the necessary code once GNOME 3 appeared. [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/HUD https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/HUD

fit2rule 7y ago

I regularly use a pretty GUI-intense program, called REAPER, for editing digital audio. Its a very powerful application, full of amazing features and powerful yet simple tools. Its a bit daunting at first, and can be overwhelming if you don't really have the patience to dig into it and find where everything is, in terms of grouped functionality. However, one key thing made learning to use REAPER smooth as butter - the '?' key. This shows the "Action List", which is a list of all the things you can do in REAPER, in a text list .. so I can quickly type '?' - then 'section' and find all the actions related to sections. VERY useful, and quite a great way to explore the periphery of features I would otherwise not have discovered. In fact, its the very first thing I teach anyone I'm introducing to REAPER, that they should use. I'd say, without this "text-based UI", the rest of the program wouldn't be nearly as accessible. A lot of that has to do with the fact that the REAPER developer seems to have a Power > Eye-candy attitude about the UI design - its clean, minimal, and functional when you first get started - but the UI is also fully tweak-able such that once you start getting productive with it, you find ways to make the GUI really shine (track colours, Layout customisations, etc.) Anyway, I think its pretty interesting that the entire UI is accessible from the text-based '?' Action list query... I wish more programs would adopt this abstraction.

pault 7y ago

The help > search menu is the thing I miss the most from Mac OS since I switched to windows. Especially in programs like Photoshop where there are dozens of nested dropdowns, hitting cmd + ?, typing a few characters, and hitting enter is such a huge boost to productivity when you haven't memorized all of the keyboard shortcuts, and it even works on menu items that don't have a shortcut. The Microsoft office suite has this functionality as well, and I really wish they would integrate it at the system level like Mac OS does.

uxamanda 7y ago
Agreed, love this feature and use it often. I wish it saved the last few searches to quickly access commonly searched items.

roryrjb 7y ago

I don't agree that GUIs are a replacement for the CLI. Yes in the past that is all we had, but really they are completely different and should be considered in parallel. CLIs were never really meant for non-technical users though as far as I'm aware, or at least the end user was already expected to have some kind of established context. I'm not really against exploration in this area but I disagree that CLIs are flawed. I'm biased of course, excuse me while I get back to my UNIX/xterm/tmux/vim development environment. EDIT: I would like to point out that I've only been in the industry for 6/7 years so it's not like I started my career where this established environment was the only choice.

johnlorentzson 7y ago

This reminds me a bit of the Dynamic Lisp Listener from Symbolics Genera-based Lisp machines.

InfinityByTen 7y ago

I wouldn't take this article to be a be all, end all. It's quite thought provoking for me personally. The reason I switched from bash to zsh was simply the UI like interface in path completion with OhMyZsh. The reason sublime works quite well for me is that there are tabs that I love to move around and see at the same time and I like the visual feedback of moving things around and switching contexts. But if I want to do something quickly.. I can easily find the command for from a simple keyboard shortcut. I think this idea can be refined further and made more and more robust and is a design pattern in the right direction. With more and more percentage of the population heading in coding-friendly direction I see this as a very viable next step.

longtermd 7y ago

Implementing a working and fast CLUI (as a search feature) was one of the easiest ways to get a real WOW-effect from our customers. /founder here think of: the website (and search results) updates in realtime with every letter you type

momokoko 7y ago

So, upterm[0] / hyper-autocomplete[1]? [0] https://github.com/railsware/upterm https://github.com/railsware/upterm [1] https://github.com/Inlustra/hyper-autocomplete https://github.com/Inlustra/hyper-autocomplete

tie_ 7y ago

The article describes pretty much what SAWS has implemented - https://github.com/donnemartin/saws https://github.com/donnemartin/saws (mad props to ~donnemartin for the implementation!)

screenbeard 7y ago

I was with you for the first half, until the demo of the command completion with clickable dropdown options and thought it looked just like the nested menus you're trying to kill. The difference is a slightly less cluttered interface, but for someone who knows what they're looking at is a menu all that different than selecting a command that gives a subset of followup commands on a single line?

Sammi 7y ago
The article addresses this: "Because the tree is hierarchical, you might think that it actually resembles a large dropdown menu. The difference is that search is built directly into its navigation, not just pointing and clicking. One clear improvement that could be made is being able to search for any subcommand without having to specify its parent command first. That way you can access any deeply nested information instantly, similar to spotlight search."

Razengan 7y ago

The examples look really cool. I'd like to add a sort of wish I have for such a "smart CLI": Being able to preview the effect of the command(s) you're currently typing, like the files/directories it's going to modify, whether it's going to change something for the entire system or specific users. Something like that would lower the intimidation factor for beginners even further.

miki123211 7y ago

This is what Microsoft Office has been doing for the past few years. For those unfamiliar, modern Office versions use ribbons instead of menus. Ribbons have a few tabs like home, layout etc. The tabs change depending on what object you're interacting with, so i.e. if you're editing a pivot table in Excel, you get two new tabs for working with pivot tables. That means you only see the options that are actually relevant to you. Each tab has buttons separated into groups. So, there might be a "alignment" group with "left", "center", "right" and "justify" inside. Most buttons have detailed descriptions of what they do and multi-layered, visible keyboard shortcuts that activate them quickly. Some even have an additional drop down for more options, so i.e. the "view" button in Access might switch you between the two most common views when clicked, but you can expand it and select a different view if need be. The latest office versions also have a search field that allows you to find any command, no matter what tab it is in. It has autocomplete, so typing piv usually shows you "pivot table" as one of the first suggestions. I use Excel and Access pretty often, and do some moderately complex things with them, but I almost don't use the traditional ribbon at all. I use shortcuts for the commands I need very often, and search for the rest. If I don't know how something is called, I go through the commands on the relevant tabs and find it eventually. I think this kind of UI scales pretty well. MS Office apps are pretty complicated and packed with features, especially the pro versions, but I think that UI paradigm is pretty scalable and nice for users.

s_gourichon 7y ago
What follows is only partly related to the overall conversation, rather an answer to the ribbon episode. The ribbon in MS Office came along roughly at the same time as 16:9 and 16:10 screens (on laptops in my memories anyway). Already on a 4:3 screen, WYSIWYG editing wastes much space on left and right of the screen, to show paper margins and page limits. And that goddamned ribbon eats up all the top of the screen, making you see only a limited band of what you could see on that very screen. Had no one the idea to make the ribbon a vertical tool bar on the left or right, like in Photoshop/Gimp and a number of other tools? Such a feeling of UI failure at the time. At that moment my computers were already all running Linux anyway, so I've never used it more than a few times on a coworker's machine. Now I no longer use WYSIWYG software. Text editing with the WYSIWYG paradigm feels superficially seducing, until you realize it actually hides the actual document content. How many times has Word shown some items in a bullet list with a different size without any visible reason ? Or in Google docs one bullet horizontally misaligned? Why? No one knows. When editing text, seeing how the final document would look like is not that important. It's more important to know the state of what you're editing. With markdown or asciidoc what you see it what your document actually contains. On top of that, WYSIWIG assumes that there is one final document appearance, which is just not true for a digital document in a digital world that could be rendered countless ways in different styles (unless your workflow targets documents in try-to-mimick-paper-form, like PDF, until that changes).

m4r35n357 7y ago

It isn't a command line "interface", it is a command line "interpreter". If you don't know this you have lost at the start. I'll stick to my shell, thanks!

ailideex 7y ago

I am quite annoyed with text user interfaces, especially in lui of a proper CLI. On two occasions that I asked people to make a CLI for something and then they made some abomination that can't be used from a script but needs to be used interactively.

ratel 7y ago

I think it is an interesting idea that needs some further exploration. I do see some problems with it that were not addressed. The way the demos are setup are by definition an NP!=P problem. It is easy to verify you found the right command, but may be fiendishly difficult to navigate the tree to get there. Menus with sub-menus having sub-menus at least makes it visually clear which paths you have not taken and allow retracing your steps. Something akin to Ctrl-R in shells may be needed to allow you to type certain keywords to find all possible actions. Options and parameters are not part of a decision tree as they don't specify a logical action that will follow, they just change the action. Those parameters need evaluating the entire progress in the tree to be able to suggest a next available parameter, option and action. Try it with something like ffmpeg. Modelling this to work in a CLUI will evolve into a hard problem very quickly. The more actions, options, parameters I add as a user the more important it becomes that I can backtrack and correct mistakes. Corrections may or may not have consequences for the position in the tree I already choose. Starting over even from there might not be the right solution in terms of usability if the correction does not necessitate it.

_pmf_ 7y ago

Matlab, Mathematica et. al. are used by tens of thousands of people daily. You have several decades of catch up to get anything resembling feature parity.

lonelappde 7y ago

They mock standard OS tree menus and then advertise their...tree menus, and justify it by saying theirs have search, ignoring that OS tree menus also have search

talkingtab 7y ago

Cool thinking. And thought provoking. I find myself increasingly being annoyed by GUI's with their rich interfaces. An interesting project is lazygit which uses gocui. For me it is useful and appealing alternative to the command line git. With each pane you press a meta key to get list of commands for the pane, and it would be interesting to see a mash up with replit somehow.

zeveb 7y ago

They've got some great ideas and insight here. The thing is, there already is a wonderful two-dimensional, general-purpose, interactive terminal/graphic interface: it's Emacs. And it really is awesome! I think this is a corollary to Greenspun's Tenth Rule ('Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp'): any sufficiently powerful UI will be an ad-hoc, inextensible, inconsistent, weaker version of Emacs.

gitgud 7y ago

> "On a technical level, a CLUI command is conceptually similar to a file path or URL. Since a complete CLUI command is simply a path down the command tree, each potential subcommand is like a portion of a file path or URL." Sounds like walking the tree of a REST api... potential CLUI framework for REST?

elagost 7y ago

It's been more than 5 years since I've used AutoCAD or other AutoDesk professional design software, but it has this. There's a command line that interfaces very well with its GUI. You can draw shapes entirely in the command line, or you can use it to help you place a second point in a line, for example.

hereisdx 7y ago

Hey! I wrote this command in a GUI CLI!

highmastdon 7y ago

This reminds me of what fish [1] (friendly interactive shell) brings for me. Together with z for directory jumping [2] and fzf for interactive lists [3] there's really no need for a "finder" or "explorer". Aside from it I've run into Xiki [4] that seems to bridge the gap on multiple levels between GUI and CLI. GUI to bring the discoverability and CLI to keep it scalable. [1] https://fishshell.com/ https://fishshell.com/ [2] https://github.com/jethrokuan/z https://github.com/jethrokuan/z [3] https://github.com/jethrokuan/fzf https://github.com/jethrokuan/fzf [4] https://xiki.org/ https://xiki.org/

lapinot 7y ago

I really like the general idea of bridging the gap between graphical and text-based interfaces, abstracting away the differences and be able to use a mixture of both. In the realm of interactive programming (eg heavily ide assisted), people with some functional and statically typed programming background would be interested in this magnificent talk about idris2: [Edwin Brady - Idris 2 - Type-driven Development of Idris] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRq2NgeFcO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRq2NgeFcO0

nojvek 7y ago

Bashing premier pro is a low blow. It’s a very powerful tool that really can’t be replicated in Cli. Even using ffmpeg CLI is a painful experience. That being said code completion, contextual help and form-ish guis give a better user experience. The most used UI element is a button and thereafter is the search input.

timka 7y ago

How come noone mentioned Aza Raskin's Ubiquity? This is HN after all!