Meet Carla Shroder's New Favorite GUI-Textmode Hybrid Shell, Xiki 176
New submitter trogdoro (3716731) writes with an excerpt from Linux Cookbook author Carla Schroder's enthusiastic introduction to what looks like a tempting tool, combining elements of GUI and text-mode interfaces: Command-line lovers, allow me to introduce you to Xiki, the incredibly interactive, flexible, and revolutionary command shell. I do not use the word "revolutionary" lightly. The command shell has not advanced all that much since the ancient days of Unix. Xiki is a giant leap forward. If you're looking for the Next Big Thing in FOSS, Xiki is it. It's not the first tool meant to combine text and graphic interface, but from the screencast demo, Xiki looks like it gets a lot of things right.
Re:Next Big Thing! (Score:2, Insightful)
Yawn; wake me when I can get the code from github.
Did you even look? It takes two seconds of scanning TFA to find the github page.
Re:Not convinced (Score:4, Insightful)
I am skeptical to the idea tbh. For commonly used commands the effort of learning them is relatively small and the rewards are great (if I ever had to type "change the permissions such that" instead of "chmod" I would just give up and use GUI) .
Re:Not convinced (Score:5, Insightful)
Other advantages of a CLI:
1. You can save the sequence of commands in a script, edit the script, and re-run it later, perhaps on different computers.
2. You can run commands in a remote SSH session.
3. You are learning skills that are applicable across a wide variety of Unix-like OSes.
4. You are learning to use powerful and flexible tools that can be piped together to automate complex tasks.
Too many security issues. (Score:5, Insightful)
what if you could.... (Score:5, Insightful)
nut kick the guy who keeps asking "what if you could...." in the screencast? That got annoying real fast.
Re:Not convinced (Score:5, Insightful)
Solution: use natural language
Interesting idea. ten to one, you would get a great lesson in how ambiguous "natural language" is. A language that does not distinguish between inclusive and exclusive OR, has no rules for resolving the order/priority of ANDs and ORs when both occur in a clause, and which has a rather cavalier approach to NOT ("Isn't the door open?" is likely to mean "I think the door is open" rather than "Is the door closed?") may not be the ideal medium for communicating your wishes to a box.
Re:Not convinced (Score:5, Insightful)
Solution: use natural language to tell the computer what you want to do.
Because we all know that all programmers do is follow the requirements document from the client, which never requires any clarification/investigation/analysis/follow-up/etc.
Re:Not convinced (Score:5, Insightful)
And also something I came to value when working in industry and developing both cli and GUI admin tools for telecoms equipment:
You can easily document, email and (to a lesser extent) talk about a cli. A GUI not so much. When you've tried to walk someone through finding the hidden option in a GUI over the phone for the tenth time you're ready to tear your hair out. With a cli you can just email some commands and that's that. Documenting a GUI invariably devolved to a lot of screenshots which makes any workflow tens of pages long, instead of ten lines of commands which you then have ample space to explain and comment on. It's also much easier to read and follow along as you're e.g. installing, than leafing through screenshot after screenshot.