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You conflate the fact that the CLI tool is just a "programmable API view" of an app, and that GUI is more of a "interaction view", with the fact that it can or

by oulipo 2y ago

You conflate the fact that the CLI tool is just a "programmable API view" of an app, and that GUI is more of a "interaction view", with the fact that it can or cannot do some stuff Now with AI and better design, nothing in theory would prevent us to "script UI apps" like we do with terminal, you could say "take a screenshot of my webpage with Chrome | set it in isometric with nice shadow using Photoshop | send it on my iPhone Twitter app" and you would get the same pipeline of course "UI apps" just have too many input / output possibilities, and you wouldn't want to have "--flags" everywhere for every possibility But that's where "natural language as a universal API" applies, or perhaps just a better design for interaction with UI apps

oulipo 2y ago
in theory, if computers were really "smart" (and I'm not talking about AI, but just better design), you could define that pipeline and it would JIT-build an optimized binary that does the equivalent of your pipeline for each app, so that it would still be an optimized process Eg. each "UI app" would just become a big API of all input/output possibilities, and "interactive mouse / keyboard / visual interaction" would just be one possibility among others Your computer would know how to pipe between each app, optimize it if possible, and give you what you want
anthk 2y ago
KDE's Konqueror+Krita+a KDE3 twitter tool would be able to do that with DCOP, DBUS grandpa but for KDE3. Ditto with Haiku OS (and Be) with the 'Hey' tool: https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/humdinger/2017-11-05_scripting_the_gui_with_hey/ https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/humdinger/2017-11-05_scripting... On pure CLI tools, that's trivial with some of them sending commands to Chromium, piping the output to ImageMagick and using something like ttytter (now it wouldn't work with the API changes). Replace Twitter with Mastodon and I'm sure you could do that with 'toot'.

by oulipo 2y ago

oulipo 2y ago

in theory, if computers were really "smart" (and I'm not talking about AI, but just better design), you could define that pipeline and it would JIT-build an optimized binary that does the equivalent of your pipeline for each app, so that it would still be an optimized process Eg. each "UI app" would just become a big API of all input/output possibilities, and "interactive mouse / keyboard / visual interaction" would just be one possibility among others Your computer would know how to pipe between each app, optimize it if possible, and give you what you want

anthk 2y ago

KDE's Konqueror+Krita+a KDE3 twitter tool would be able to do that with DCOP, DBUS grandpa but for KDE3. Ditto with Haiku OS (and Be) with the 'Hey' tool: https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/humdinger/2017-11-05_scripting_the_gui_with_hey/ https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/humdinger/2017-11-05_scripting... On pure CLI tools, that's trivial with some of them sending commands to Chromium, piping the output to ImageMagick and using something like ttytter (now it wouldn't work with the API changes). Replace Twitter with Mastodon and I'm sure you could do that with 'toot'.