On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 05:26:07PM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote: > > Should CLI (command line interface) have a nice UI library? > > I don't understand the question. A library that does what? > "Nice" in which respect? > > > today web dev has so many libraries that make web pages with rich/colorful > > interactive views. > > Not sure how that's relevant to a UI library for a CLI. > > > But CLI is still in dull mode. That should be improved in these days. > > for example, run "df -h" we got the statistics with plain text. But web > > statistics for cloud storage (GCP,AWS etc) are chart like, which give people > > more intuitive feeling. > > Do you mean CLI tools should be able to generate&display images? > That could be useful, and indeed xterm and friends nowadays are able to > display images so it's possible, but I suspect it's just easier to have > CLI tools generate JPEG files and then display them in > a separate window. > > But maybe it's easier to go the other way: look for a GUI that can be > conveniently controlled from a "command line" or some such combination. > There's a lot of work in the general vicinity. I think Jupiter could > qualify for some cases, Emacs for others, or you could use the > Javascript console of Firefox for that as well.
After a detour around whiptail I ended up full-circle with Tcl/Tk. It is still the nicest, smallest self-contained graphical toolkit enabling one to wrap some GUI around CLI programs. The whole pack is one or two orders of magnitude smaller than some web browser monstrosity and much easier to extend, handle and embed. The language (Tcl) may be a bit alien at first, but all in all I think wrapping one's head around a "modern" toolkit programming interface (à la Gtk or Qt) is still at least one order of magnitude less fun than that. Why is it that complexity takes over and we end up painting ourselves into corners? Then, corporate folks ramble about "path dependencies" and things, instead of acknowledging that we humans sometimes just aren't good at taking decisions ;-) But perhaps that's just me. Cheers -- t
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