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> ...how would you write something like that for a file browser... A GUI program can do everything that a command line app can do and more, but unless we discu

> ...how would you write something like that for a file browser... A GUI program can do everything that a command line app can do and more, but unless we discuss exact requirements I can't answer the question very precisely. In terms of input and output I think there are generally more options with a GUI though. Funny story on this topic - last night I was playing around with Fedora 21 + Gnome 3 and when I used git (in a terminal), whenever it needed a username or password it would pop up a GUI with a single text input. It's called askpass and I still haven't found out what exactly necessitates such a workflow, but I thought it was pretty hilarious. > ...on any platform. Command line programs don't work on every platform. Far from it. They don't even work on every Linux distro and especially not with normal usage on variants such as Android. So that's a bit of an unfair requirement to add just for GUI apps, don't you think? I think we're in agreement that they both have pros and cons. It certainly can be easier to write a command line application that works on all platforms. I wasn't arguing against that - I was arguing with the guy on this thread who seemed to think that command lines are the single best way to interface with the computer. The guy who responded to almost every dissenting point of view...(not you). I didn't realize that it was not you at first, but my first response was to that person.

pfranz 12y ago
By any platform I meant "a platform of your choice." Like I mentioned in my first reply, I'm not aware of any OS's file browser with a plugin system to do something like what I described in any scope. I'm curious the tools someone who had their choice would gravitate to. There are a lot of things I like with a terminal; history, tab completion, man pages (all OS help pages are generally useless. The only aspect I've ever liked is OSX's searchable help menu that will hightlight menu options). On the gui end you can't beat the discoverability, window management, but a big win is an undo stack. I feel like touchscreens are a step back in discoverability (but they have their own merits). I think terminal people really latch on to the composibility of Unix apps that are provided via pipes. I've seen people try to come up with a gui equivalent (copy/paste is the closest), each gui feels like a walled garden (almost as bad as iOS apps). Something like AppleScript or D-Bus tries to address this, but I feel like if you're writing a script its basically a less-interactive shell. Automator seems like a decent take on this, but not too many apps expose an api for that and I've struggled trying to get it do what I wanted.
- WorldWideWayne 12y ago
  Great summary. Thank you. Just one question regarding the program you described - you're talking about the "lss" command you wrote, correct? You said that it exists in order to "group image sequences together. This makes finding missing images in a sequence, knowing the range, and dealing with 1000's of files in a folder trivial". I don't know how you're grouping image sequences together, but I can't imagine why a GUI wouldn't be able to represent image groups as well as or better than a terminal program. Could you tell me? Alternatively, is your program open source? I'd love to check it out.
  - pfranz 12y ago
    Each application and vfx studio has their own conventions for notating a group of images (if they're zero-padded, if they're only even numbers, etc). Most of the File Open dialogs for these apps implemented their own grouping. I've never seen a general gui file browser version of this. Here's a custom file open menu from one of those apps that wrote their own implementation (you can expand down to see the individual files): http://www.tweaksoftware.com/static/documentation/rv/current/html/6_Users_alan_build_tweak_release-64_html_temp_images_grabFile.png http://www.tweaksoftware.com/static/documentation/rv/current... Here's a Python library with generic grouping logic: https://github.com/4degrees/clique https://github.com/4degrees/clique
    - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
      > I've never seen a general gui file browser version of this. The hooks are there to do it though, at least in Windows Explorer and Gnome/Nautilus. Something very similar built into Windows with html file/folder groups and zip files. There are tons of third-party Windows Explorer extensions that change the way files are displayed. You can definitely create virtual nodes and hide nodes that you don't want to show (even in native open/save dialogs). While I have no doubt that it would be possible on OS X, I suspect that easy-to-use hooks are not available for Finder like they are in Windows Explorer. You can write a QuickLook extension for Finder though. (Some file browser extensions are easier to write than others. The image sequence in particular would definitely be easier to implement

pfranz 12y ago

By any platform I meant "a platform of your choice." Like I mentioned in my first reply, I'm not aware of any OS's file browser with a plugin system to do something like what I described in any scope. I'm curious the tools someone who had their choice would gravitate to. There are a lot of things I like with a terminal; history, tab completion, man pages (all OS help pages are generally useless. The only aspect I've ever liked is OSX's searchable help menu that will hightlight menu options). On the gui end you can't beat the discoverability, window management, but a big win is an undo stack. I feel like touchscreens are a step back in discoverability (but they have their own merits). I think terminal people really latch on to the composibility of Unix apps that are provided via pipes. I've seen people try to come up with a gui equivalent (copy/paste is the closest), each gui feels like a walled garden (almost as bad as iOS apps). Something like AppleScript or D-Bus tries to address this, but I feel like if you're writing a script its basically a less-interactive shell. Automator seems like a decent take on this, but not too many apps expose an api for that and I've struggled trying to get it do what I wanted.

WorldWideWayne 12y ago
Great summary. Thank you. Just one question regarding the program you described - you're talking about the "lss" command you wrote, correct? You said that it exists in order to "group image sequences together. This makes finding missing images in a sequence, knowing the range, and dealing with 1000's of files in a folder trivial". I don't know how you're grouping image sequences together, but I can't imagine why a GUI wouldn't be able to represent image groups as well as or better than a terminal program. Could you tell me? Alternatively, is your program open source? I'd love to check it out.
- pfranz 12y ago
  Each application and vfx studio has their own conventions for notating a group of images (if they're zero-padded, if they're only even numbers, etc). Most of the File Open dialogs for these apps implemented their own grouping. I've never seen a general gui file browser version of this. Here's a custom file open menu from one of those apps that wrote their own implementation (you can expand down to see the individual files): http://www.tweaksoftware.com/static/documentation/rv/current/html/6_Users_alan_build_tweak_release-64_html_temp_images_grabFile.png http://www.tweaksoftware.com/static/documentation/rv/current... Here's a Python library with generic grouping logic: https://github.com/4degrees/clique https://github.com/4degrees/clique
  - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
    > I've never seen a general gui file browser version of this. The hooks are there to do it though, at least in Windows Explorer and Gnome/Nautilus. Something very similar built into Windows with html file/folder groups and zip files. There are tons of third-party Windows Explorer extensions that change the way files are displayed. You can definitely create virtual nodes and hide nodes that you don't want to show (even in native open/save dialogs). While I have no doubt that it would be possible on OS X, I suspect that easy-to-use hooks are not available for Finder like they are in Windows Explorer. You can write a QuickLook extension for Finder though. (Some file browser extensions are easier to write than others. The image sequence in particular would definitely be easier to implement