Ask HN: What graphical user interface do you wish had a command line interface? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What graphical user interface do you wish had a command line interface?

18 pointsyanokwa41 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11705509 asks the reverse.

JIRA needs a solid CLI tool. I wrote something like this at one of my past companies that has gone batshit crazy about agile. The process weighed so heavily on me that I felt the need to automate it via JIRA's REST API, which yielded (after some hacking) a CLI tool.

The tool was heavily focused on making tolerable the idiosyncrasies and vagaries of working for that one company, but this gave me food for thought: there's definitely room for doing bug tracking from the command line.

A guy I used to work with did this too. He had it tied in with his Git installation so it would listen for certain commit messages/branching actions and automatically modify Jira's state to reflect his work.

Ha! I did something similar to track time in JIRA's work logs. Changing a branch == context switch => new work log boundary.

Those were fun times.

Web browsers. For example if I'm on Hacker News and want to visit the "Ask" page, my options are a mouse or navigating to the URL bar and hand editing the text. Why can't I just type "ask" and go there?

I think firefox used to have a feature where when you searched and the search found/highlighted the item, if it was a url, pressing enter or space would follow the url. I really miss that feature.

I have this using the "Findbar Tweak" [1] add-on, it works with searching and pressing enter. You can also press / for quick search.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/findbar-tweak/

Try Vimperator add-on for Firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimperator/

Given enough proficiency, you will not have to use your mouse while browsing.

Firefox still has this feature, I believe it is referred to as "quick find" and is available with either forward-slash or apostrophe. You can follow a link with Enter and go to the next instance of the search term with ctrl-g or cmd-g.

Gif example: https://i.imgur.com/C2zH4CZ.gif

apostrophe starts quick find, but only searches link text. So in your comment, typing 'gif would only select the text in the link; it wouldn't find as a result the "Gif" earlier in that sentence.

And with either, F3 or C-g searches forward, and Shift-F3 or Shift-C-G searches backward. If you're on a link, Return navigates to that link.

One reason I enjoy sites with human-meaningful URLs is that it makes it easier to do this without leaving the keyboard.

I can use the Keyboard shortcut for the URL bar, then edit the url quickly.

I use this commonly to view content from various subreddits.

If you really wanted to you could type this in the console: `window.location = '/ask'`

There's an extension for Chrome that might be helpful to you: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...

This is a life-changer for me ever since I installed it a few years ago. With Vimium and Alfred, my hands are on the keyboard 95% of the time.

P.S. If you tweak the settings, you may even be able to browse/navigate the web with just one hand on the keyboard.

You should take a look at qutebrowser, it has Vim like keybinding http://www.qutebrowser.org/

You can hit CTRL/CMD-F and type "ask", repeat CTRL/CMD-F if necessary, then hit ESC+return when the link is highlighted. You can also hit TAB until ask is outlined, then hit return. I don't for a minute think those make for a great keyboard interface, or really answer your question, but they are additional options currently available to you.

The Vimperator extension adds vim-like commands to Firefox, including following links (but also much, much more). It's amazing.

I want a really great text-only profiler for the JVM. Something like YourKit or JProfiler, but either entirely CLI-based, or with a built-in REPL that would let me run commands against the profiler, or with a very keyboard-friendly curses UI.

This could be really low-hanging fruit, too. Much of the above could be achieved my extruding SQLite output from an existing profiler. SQL-savvy programmers will do the rest.

Chat. I did a proof of concept a while back (on my github) that wasn't quite usable day to day, but it'd be nice to check and see if I had any new messages from the command line without having to drop back to my very busy, distracting, "UI" desktop space.

Try https://irssi.org/

I used Irssi back when it first came out; it blew BitchX, ircII and even LiCe out of the water. Unfortunately, IRC isn't widely used in commercial contexts. Most of us are stuck using moronic graphical chat UIs. Shout out to HipChat, yo.

WeeChat is a more modern client. Lots of scripting possibilities and you can hook into it from remote / mobile easily.

For better or worse, Slack is widely used in commercial contexts, and you can connect to it using an IRC client.

https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connectin...

What about Finch?

https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Finch

Not exactly a CLI but I wish every program had a Sublime Text-like command palette shortcut for performing actions and accessing menus by typing their names.

A lot of OSX programs have this. Makes using a lot of IDE's very easy.

You can use the Command + Shift + / shortcut to access the menu search box directly from OSX apps.

simple templates of movie editing where I am just adding a title, clipping videos at start/end times, etc

for example:

- movie-title title1.mp4 "my awesome movie" --style=lower-left

- movie-cat title1.mp4 clip1.mp4 clip2.mp4 clip3.mp4 --transition=blur --output movie1.mp4

- movie-upload youtube movie1.mp4

Edit: formatting

Check ffmpeg

Not graphical, but i wish i could skip talking and just text with siri.

I inadvertently installed a jailbreak tweak on my 6 that allows me to do this. I'm not sure what it's called and I have like 60 tweaks installed, but it'll be a popular one for sure.

Facebook Messenger, Whats'app, Slack. Slack especially, would love to get rid of the insane RAM eating monster their OSX app is.

Controlling my TV/TV guide/Netflix

All of them.

I like this answer best, but I want to go back on something I said prior many months ago; I said I hated gesture interaction.

I was Windows years ago, then have been exclusively Linux for years up until now where I am on Mac - it was super clunky at first - but I really like some of the gesturing.

I'd love a gesture (configurable) Cli.

Type something then swipe to pipe to grep or something. It would be an interesting look into the two...

don't forget api interface.

A command line interface is basically a BASH API.

Not sure this qualifies, but I wish Alfred App had deeper command-line integration.

Facebook Messenger.

google play music

Absolutely wish this existed, I've contemplated hacking something together for use in my lemonbar configs but haven't started anything yet. As far as I know nothing like this exists aside from https://github.com/simon-weber/gmusicapi

Nice question. Did you re-ask the question on purpose ? I think there are many that I'd like. I use OSX now, and I'm wondering what I will replace the Dock/Sidebar/bookmarks when the life of my Macbook will end and I will only use the command line.

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