Interoperability Between the GUI and the CLI?

shylock0 asks: "I use AutoCAD pretty extensively, and one of the things I've always loved about it is the fact that, in addition to having a GUI, it has a really great command line -- which you access simply by starting to type, and which will actually work alongside your mouse. CAD lends itself to this duality, mainly because its nice to be able to deal with the overall work visually, but be able to specify dimensions exactly. Having to use the mouse to click on a separate dimensioning tool-box for every element you create wastes a substantial amount of time. You can even use mouse and keyboard side-by-side, without clicking yourself into a different environment -- for instance, if you have selected an element, and are using the mouse to rotate it, starting to type commands to resize the object doesn't stop the mouse from being in rotation mode. Such functionality would allow complex tasks -- beyond just opening, saving, and so forth -- using direct keyboard input, but would work in the context of the GUI. For instance, it would be great if I could copy files from an open window just by starting to type 'copy'. What other apps, both commercial and free, still have an easy-to-enter command-line style element?"

"This seems to me to be a feature that would be great to have, particularly in operating systems and productivity apps. Once you get the hang of the commands, and assuming you can type quickly, keyboard input is actually faster than using the mouse. In AutoCAD, I can design an entire house using just the keyboard. How much productivity has been lost by the decline of keyboard use beyond simple shortcuts?"

Comments

CLIM

[__past__]

A lot of Lisp applications used to use CLIM, the Common Lisp Interface Manager. It integrates command line and GUI style interaction naturally - it is based around "presentations" of the objects in your program, i.e. whenever you "present" something as either text or an icon or whatnot, it remebers what it is, and the output can be used as input for other functions, be they called by name at the command line or, for example, as a menu entry.

The symbolics Lisp Machine user interface was based around this. For an impression of it looked like and worked, look at this movie. CLIM is available for the two major commercial Lisp implementations from Franz, Inc. and Xanalys; there is also a free implementation in the works. Here are some relevant links.

Re:Konqueror

[TephX]

Well, I suppose it would have been, but I didn't know about it, and KDE has its own screensaver system (I'm not sure if it's embedding something else or what, but it has its own password dialog - it matches color schemes and fonts with your current KDE setup, which is a slight improvement, I suppose). If you're a programmer, though, and you use KDE, I'd encourage you to check out dcop. Granted, not everything (or even close to it) is scriptable at this point, but there are a fair number of functions you can get to - you're basically directly accessing the exported API of a program by this method. Type

dcop

for a list of programs you have running which provide a DCOP interface, then

dcop program

for a list of interfaces, and so on until you get down to the actual functions you can call.