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Idea #6461: Give Autoglade GUIs to favorite command line tools

Written by dtmilano the 5 Apr 08 at 19:49. Category: Programming. Related project: Nothing/Others. Status: New
Rationale
We all know that Ubuntu and Linux need to let in more people. Personally I think that a way to achieve this is to provide more graphical user interfaces to users that opted to stay away from the command line.
After all, a great percentage of Windows users have never touched the command line, and although we may think that the command line is much powerful, respecting their freedom to choose let's build the windows to let them in.

Traditional methods impose a high entry barrier for GUI programming. Information is not always easy to find, documentation is scarce and sometimes beginners don't know where to start.

Autoglade, in combination with other powerful tools such as Glade interface designer and Nautilus actions provide a simple way to give a lot of command line applications a graphical face, with no or basic programming only.

There are other tools that help a lot in providing this bridge between this two separate worlds. Circumscribing our case to the GNOME desktop one of this tools is Nautilus Actions. It provides the way to call a specified action from the nautilus file manager. Those actions can be simply programmed as scripts in the scripting language of your choice, mainly in bash for simplicity and availability.

But sometimes these scripts need a graphical interface and you don't want to write a full fledged application to achieve these elementary tasks. Here is where the tool we are introducing today comes into scene.

Autoglade will help as to provide these graphical interfaces to our scripts with no programming at all needed in the simplest and medium complexity tasks and with a much reduced programming needs in complex tasks.

Autoglade: http://autoglade.sf.net
Tutorial: http://autoglade.wiki.sourceforge.net/autoglade+tutorial+-+first+steps
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Solution #1: Auto-generated solution of idea #6461
Written by dtmilano the 5 Apr 08 at 19:49.
Ubuntu Brainstorm was updated in January 2009. Since the idea #6461 was submitted before this update, its rationale and solution are not separated. Please vote accordingly, and if you have the necessary rights, please separate the rationale from the solution. Thanks!
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Solution #2: bash gui
Written by da1nonly the 1 Feb 09 at 11:29.
create a bash script gui similar to yahoo pipes, where users can quickly create gui with out writing codes and also this would allow newbies to automate certain tasks with out having to use the konsole.

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Comments
vexorian wrote on the 5 Apr 08 at 21:03
You'll be surprised but this will not help at all to keep people away from the command line.

Surprisingly, the user does not really need to use the command line in Ubuntu, but a lot of people will tell him terminal commands instead of the GUI way when helping them. You can try making 3 more alternatives for each command but that's what's going on right now. I think they do it instinctively since regardless of the unfriendly stigma people put in the terminal, it is just easier to tell a user to type something than to try to tell him how to use a GUI.

So, we keep seeing "sudo apt-get install packagename" in forums and tutorials instead of "Go to synaptic and install packagename"...

KIAaze wrote on the 8 Jul 08 at 11:52
Yes, that's probably true (I know I would give CLI instructions), but it still looks like a good RAD tool to create GUIs.

It may be out of place here, but thanks for the tip. I'll try it out if I have some time.

lavinog wrote on the 8 Aug 09 at 16:09
The tutorial link is broken


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