For me it's the other way around I wish there would be better CLI support for GUI apps.
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
56 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
1261 readers
45 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
It's been years since I had to admin Windows servers, but I was quite impressed with the number of MS products where the install and configuration tools would output the Powershell commands to carry out the changes you'd asked for. It made it quite a lot easier to automate. I'd love to see that paradigm catch on more widely, with the GUI and CLI having the same functionality and the GUI giving you the commands to run.
I like gui file browser with integrated console window that prints all the commands you trigger by using gui as well.
Any examples?
- Gimp to batch edit pictures in a script (I know about ImageMagick but still)
- Excel to change stuff in excel files quickly (I know about python modules but it's so complicated to use)
- Proprietary VPN software like Cisco AnyConnect, I want to automate the login when I boot, but they don't let me
Just from the top of my head.
- Gimp to batch edit pictures in a script (I know about ImageMagick but still)
It seems to exist: https://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Basic_Batch/
For Excel there is a PowerShell module called Import-Excel that I use all the time.
I see, nice, but I'm on Linux, so perhaps I need to run power shell there ^^
I forgot where I was posting. (I use both win and Linux pretty heavily.) I have pwsh, let me see if import-excel works on linux and report back.
Appears to work as well as it does on windows. I guess the only downside is learning powershell if you have no previous experience with it.
If you don't want to use PowerShell in Linux, there's also nushell, which is another (non-POSIX) shell that can process Excel files
load more comments
(2 replies)
pavucontrol. I switch between usb headset and my external speakers all the time. Continually going to this gui is kind of annoying.
I use a little oneliner with tofi (rofi/wofi would also work) to select the current output and avoid pavucontrol. It's mapped to a sway binding but would probably work in any wm/de:
pactl set-default-sink $(pactl list short sinks |awk '{print $2}' |tofi $tofi_args)
I'm using pipewire so the functionality of pactl is actually provided through pipewire-pulse I think
load more comments
(2 replies)
I love programs like freecad despite the really hard/unintuitive gui. 95% of all the modelling i need to do (as an amateur) can be done easily in a python script.
The finishing touches like adding filets and chamfers are the annoying part were gui is easier, due to the way edges are referenced.
Likewise at work, we have to produce a lot of regular reports in excel. All done via python / sql.
load more comments
(1 replies)
yt-dlp. Too many options to remember and look up every time, but all useful and missing from GUIs when you just want to dowload audio or 'good enough' quality video in batches without re-encoding.
While nmtui is perfectly fine for the CLI-uninitiated, I sometimes wonder why the nm-connection-editor window doesn't provide the same level of functionality.
Too many options to remember and look up every time
This is a good use case for shell aliases. If you can identify a few of your use cases, you can give each bundle of options its own command.
I do exactly this for downloading music, I aliased my preferred options to 'yt-audio'
Would you mind sharing your command?
This is what I use (with zsh):
yt-audio() {
yt-dlp --no-playlist -f 'ba' -x --audio-format mp3 $1
}
yt-audio-playlist() {
yt-dlp -f 'ba' -x --audio-format mp3 $1
}
It takes the best quality available and downloads it to mp3.
There’s a firefox extension that generates the cli command for whatever video you’re on. Let’s you check boxes for the format, sponsorblock, etc and then copies it to your clipboard.
Just search the addon store for yt-dlp and it should show up
You can have most of the settings pre-loaded in its config file. I mostly let it do my preset -f, or when that fails do a -F to see what encodings are available.
load more comments
(1 replies)
(Windows only warning, unless someone wants to add Linux support)
I didn't really search around for GUIs way back, but ended up making a basic GUI because I wanted to learn programming.
With just having options as checkboxes for YouTube-dl. It has served me well all these years. It was literally the thing I made while learning programming so the code is pretty janky when I look back at it though...
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Rclone. Not because it's a complicated tool, but because I would like a history of my file transfers and a few graphs to show we what speeds, files sizes and whether the transfer succeeded. At the moment in order to confirm my home backups have succeeded, I have to run a separate size comparisons between my different datastores.
Probably not what you want, but rclone now has a simple web ui built in: https://rclone.org/gui/
I looked at it a few months back and it didn't have the history side of things, just the setup and realtime stats which I'd already got through the CLI. Thanks tho!
load more comments
(3 replies)
There's no CLI that k wish I had a GUI for, but there's many GUIs for which I wish there was a CLI version.
The cli controls the computer while the GUI controls the user
Why would i use something so restrictive as cli tools when i can change the data directly with assembly?
Not at all.They are 2 ways do the same thing. The GUI can tell you what options are available. The CLI needs you to memorise them, or go somewhere else to look them up.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I'd love supported GUI apps for pacman and systemd. I know there are GUI's out there for them, but they are not supported by the main project, so they don't count.
Yeah I think a good GUI for systemd will be super useful even for people comfortable with command line.
Sometimes you need an overview of what is running on the system.
There's a TUI called sysz for systemd stuff, but I haven't found a true GUI
load more comments
(1 replies)
I'm missing a good GUI to manage SELinux. It is probably because I don't know how to handle it but I hate this thing with passion.
Restic Backup!
Mount a network share permanently on Kubuntu. Non IT people need to do backups too. And Plasma apps can't access network shares unless they are mounted.
systemctl
A single, decent, maintained one for LVM.
Redhat had a couple of goes at this and they suck ass big time and rely on KDE (so no good for any other DE / WM). I'm not sure anything really works, so I'll say: none exist.
Pandoc, for sure. I love its versatility, it's made it super easy for me to do most of my writing in markdown — and a lot of MD editors have it built-in as an export feature.
But I use it too rarely to know the CLI commands by heart, and sometimes it would just be super helpful to open a GUI and batch convert (and/or collate) a bunch of files to a new format.
Tell you what, throw Imagemagick and maybe a light OCR backend into the package as a Swiss Army Knife for document management, I'd probably be happy.
I'm surprised at the shortage of good Borg repository visualization tools. There are tools but they're either incomplete or they try to do too much.
I've kinda grown towards CLI the last year or so. I used to make wrappers around CLIs for myself even haha
swap and zram configuration. lots of games need more than distro defaults
INOTIFY a GUI for monitor file changes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inotify
load more comments
(2 replies)
I'd love to have archivemount or a similar tool integrated in a file manager
I'd also love to have some sort of full featured gui software to install and manage custom roms in phones, allowing to do everything, from unlocking bootloaders to downloading and flashing/upgrading roms. For the tasks that require manual steps, it could offer illustrated steps, with a community driven database of phone models.
Git - the Github Desktop application is a great example of how easy git could be for users like me who only rarely use git. Every time I need to do somethign other then a simple pull or push I need to look it up and by the time I need it again I have forgotten the command and need to look it up again. Just give me something like Github Desktop on linux
load more comments
(2 replies)
view more: next ›