Re: PROPOSAL: Automatic wrapping of CLIs with GUIs

[Marius Vollmer <mvo zagadka ping de>]

lutterdc@cs.purdue.edu (David Lutterkort) writes:

> So, here are some of the questions racing through my head: Would this be a
> useful program ?

I think it's way cool.

I wouldn't regard as *the* break-thru idea for finally making the
command line accessible to GUI people, tho.  I see as a very solid way
to quickly whip up a rich GUI for certain programs where this is
useful.  Encaps is a good example, while ls probably is not.

Therefore, I would not focus on wrapping individual command line
programs, but more on convenient access to them, and a simple way to
rig up good GUIs for them.  Of course this is what wickel is doing
now, I'm thinking more about its future directions here.  That is, you
should not necessarily focus on wrapping a single program, with GUI
features that map one-to-one to command line switches, and embedding
GUI stuff into man pages.  I see more potential for it as the
foundation of an extensible `high-level' toolkit for quickly writing
GUIs for simple tasks that are readily done on the command line today.

The reasoning should not be: "Look, here is this encaps with oodles of
options.  Lets make a GUI for it."  But rather "Now, a feature-full
ASCII to PostScript converter would be a really cool thing to have.
Ahh, there is encaps, let's just wickel a nice GUI around it."

Such a GUI wouldn't need to be everything to everybody because it
would be so easy to write in the first place, and people could quickly
adapt it by hacking the source.

I always think about Emacs on these occasions, and how the `Emacs
community' works.  Suppose there is a question on comp.gnome.help

    Is there a convenient way to print ASCII files in GNOME with
    two columns and a headline?

and someone answeres

    Sure, I use this all day

      (use-modules (gnome wickel))

      ;; couple of lines to make encaps do some simple things..
      (... "encaps" ...)
      
    Just [simple instructions so that it will appear on the panel menu
     and will be started with gnomeg]

So the questioneer sees how simple it is to teach its desktop to do
new things and he might even be able to make some sense of the posted
code and change little things about it so that it becomes even more
useful.

> Is GUILE/Scheme the right language ?

Of course! ;-)

Btw, I really like the "wickel" name!