I know that GUI does not cover most of functionalities, for good reasons - being specialized to task (like files app), it provides more fine-grained experience.

Yet, I find that there are common commands which is terminal-only, or not faithfully implemented. for instance,

  • Commands like apt update/apt upgrade might be needed, as GUI may not allow enough interactions with it.
  • I heard some immutable distros require running commands for rollbacks.

These could cause some annoyance for those who want to avoid terminal unless necessary (including me). Hence, I bet there are terminal emulators which restricts what commands you could run, and above all, present them as buttons. This will make you recall the commonly used commands, and run them accordingly. Is there projects similar to what I describe? Thanks!

  • @k4j8
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    41 month ago

    Interesting idea. If you really break it down, the “terminal with command buttons” is similar in concept to saving each of the commands as a script and putting those scripts in a directory to act as “buttons.”

    I’ve also seen some programs such as Kopia, a backup tool, that provide a GUI with the equivalent terminal commands for what is bring done shown at the bottom.

    I don’t think what you’re describing exists, probably because experts don’t need it and beginners would prefer a full GUI.

    There is Nushell, which promises more helpful error responses for the terminal, but its too early for it to be targeted at beginners in my opinion.

    • @Nibodhika
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      31 month ago

      As much as I love nushell it will ever be too early for beginners, POSIX compliance is a big problem there. They have their very good reasons to not be POSIX compliant, but someone starting out should familiarize themselves with the most common pattern first before jumping to something completely different that will prevent them from running code snippets they might find online.