I know that GUI does not cover most of functionalities, for good reasons - being specialized to task (like files app), it provides more fine-grained experience.
Yet, I find that there are common commands which is terminal-only, or not faithfully implemented. for instance,
- Commands like
apt update/apt upgrademight be needed, as GUI may not allow enough interactions with it. - I heard some immutable distros require running commands for rollbacks.
These could cause some annoyance for those who want to avoid terminal unless necessary (including me). Hence, I bet there are terminal emulators which restricts what commands you could run, and above all, present them as buttons. This will make you recall the commonly used commands, and run them accordingly. Is there projects similar to what I describe? Thanks!
I understand the desire to want to avoid the command line, but you’re severely restricting your ability to troubleshoot by doing so. Every operating system has a terminal and command line, and there’s going to be cases where you’ll want to drop into a shell to do something that has no GUI equivalent.
Yeah I am not suggesting an entire terminal replacement, which is unreasonable.
I dont think you should habe to learn to usw the terminal in order to debug your operating system. If i would switch my mom to Linux, i dont want her to have to use the terminal. So making life easier for those people would grealty improve the appeal of Linux to tech noobs. By arguing we need the terminal for Linux, we gatekeep people from trying and using Linux, if they are afraid of technology
Coming back to this with thoughts. What you’re describing sounds a lot like a menu tree.
“Press 1 to do this, 2 to do that, 3 to go to submenu A, 4 for B,” etc.
1“You have pressed 1. Do you want to turn on option ABC? [Y / n]”
Y“Do you want option QWERTY47? [Y/n]”
N“Are you sure you want to run
notthebees --abc --no-qwerty47? [Y/n]”N“Aborted.”
It sounds like a standards problem waiting to happen because no two menus will be alike, but hey, things like this can and do exist, and setting one up isn’t that hard, only time consuming.
Something like this can kind of be achieved programmatically by unraveling bash completion arguments and loosely parsing terminal help strings.
They aren’t all formatted uniformly though, so you’ll need to come up with a filtering mechanism to prevent returning garbage. You’ll also always be a little out of date…
