customizable gui for cli apps

[kilele]

Hi
I thought the following tool could be handy, a customizable layout system to manage cmd based programs.
It could be useful for people who suffer panic when using commandline little programs with many options difficult to remember, or in case that you need to process a file with different programs one after the other.
It would allow different layouts, comboboxes for the cmd options, buttons, flow designer for a row of tasks performed by different tools..
Going further some of these panel regions could be used to start/embed external programs which have their own gui, for example paintbrush.

[hamradio]

Something like Customizable Remote Administration Panel (CRAP) perhaps?

[Ath]

Or my (IMHO) similar tool WinButtons

Both aren't actually feasible for n00b users to start out with, but a more seasoned user can set up a set of applications for that n00b less experienced user using either tool.

[Tuxman]

Sounds like FARR could do that.

[kilele]

Thanks guys. I found both programs after posting this topic and plan to comment my impressions later.
Haha i'm afraid i'm the numb user here.

[mouser]

Not at all -- in fact there are other free tools for doing what you are suggesting, which are more specifically focused on the task you are asking about -- I just can't remember them off-hand, so i hope others will chime in.

My Find and Run Robot program (FARR), which was suggested above, isn't quite meant for this purpose.  However my other program, Drag and Drop Robot, *was* made specifically to provide a simple GUI for executing commandline apps that you need to run in batch on a large number of target files.

Still, Drag and Drop Robot is not the ideal tool for creating custom GUIs for commandline tools as it doesn't have nice ways to set options, etc.

Again, I know there have been some attempts to make generic front ends for driving commandline tools -- I hope someone will post there experience with those here.

[skwire]

Again, I know there have been some attempts to make generic front ends for driving commandline tools -- I hope someone will post there experience with those here.

-mouser (November 06, 2014, 10:08 AM)

Agreed...I can recall seeing such attempts in the past but damned if I can remember the name of any of them.  That said, I enjoy writing front-ends for CLI apps.  kilele, did you have any specific CLI apps in mind?

[MilesAhead]

I found this tool on sourceforge.net
http://sourceforge.n...ects/commandlinegui/

But the ones I've seen have been for specific programs like Guis for xcopy.

[kilele]

I also found Phart from another DC member :
https://www.donation....msg304983#msg304983

Nothing special in mind, Skwire, just a hobby thing to make a pseudo ide for a set of cli tools called FASE to create games for a 8-bit microcomputer, ZX Spectrum.

I thought of embedding a few apps on a gui panel: a grahic editor of your choice, Tiled (a tile map editor) and buttons for cli tools which process such graphics/maps and do other tasks like changing configurations from the engine's .asm  files and then recompile with a cli tool, etc.
It may be overkill in this case but this kind of workflow could be useful for people used to pipe different cli apps with gui apps, programmers who dislike designing guis or prefer to work with their favourite tools.

[kilele]

WinButtons doesn't work on my XP.. it gets frozen when running a ui
I really like smelly Phart & Crap  
Phart is compact but I don't know how to get it to work. It'd be nice to see command examples in the source code.
Crap is simply great though i'd like it to show borders around buttons.

As for my suggestion to start and bind external programs with gui, there could be dedicated room for them on the panel and the other buttons would rearrange themselves ?

Edit :

Phart runs command 'locally' by pressing <shift+Button>

[rjbull]

If your CLI apps include DOS ones and batch files, take a look at Horst Schaeffer's WBAT, which while itself DOS, is as Windows-like as you'll find in a console application.  I've seen it used as the menu interface in some rescue boot disks.