[PLUG] remembering often-used commands

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Sat Mar 18 18:20:34 UTC 2006


On Sat, 18 Mar 2006 09:38:15 -0800
Eric Wilhelm <scratchcomputing at gmail.com> dijo:
> # from John Jordan
> # on Saturday 18 March 2006 08:02 am:
> 
> >I'd still like something where I could just point and click to select
> >often-used commands.

> In my experience, you really don't want much more than a text editor for 
> collecting snippets of commands.  Consider what a "click to run" 
> interface would imply:
> 
>   o  You must be in the right working directory or else enter absolute 
> paths to all filenames.  Some commands (e.g. ps2pdf) expect to write 
> output into the working directory unless explicitly told otherwise.
> 
>   o  You always want to run the command with the same filename 
> arguments.  Otherwise, such a system would have to prompt you for one 
> or more filenames and would either do this with a plain text-entry 
> dialog or a file-chooser (both of which (depending on the GUI toolkit) 
> can have tab complete, at the expense of some extra code.)

Those are excellent points that I hadn't thought of. 

> If the commands of which you speak really are repetitive and predictable 
> enough such that the above two points are non-issues, then it is best 
> to either make them into cron jobs or scripts.  Cron jobs run on a 
> timer, scripts run when you say "name_of_my_script".

No, they are like:

sudo ln -f /chroot/breezy/32bits/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf

I already went through trying to get that into a script and ended up with a half-solution (see previous discussion here). Scripts are too complicated for desktop users like me. Yes, I realize I am not supposed to be using Linux. It ought to be illegal for someone without a CompSci degree and programming experience to use Linux. I've gotten that attitude from a lot of Linux people. It's never stated overtly, but I can read between the lines. Well, too bad. I just want something that a dummy can use. I'm a dummy. I'm here. And I intend to stay.

But your points above are very good. Nevertheless, I think a simple bookmark-like click-and-select feature would be useful. If the command needs to be run in a specific folder, then the user can type the whole path before saving it. I don't see why such a feature has to handle everything that a script could do. Its purpose is just to pop in one command. Consider it like a super-tab feature. Maybe it could just be a plugin or extension for gnome-terminal.

By the way, I just tried doing the above link command using tab. It took six tabs to get it all, and after each tab I had to type more letters to get tab to go to the next stop. It would have been faster just to type it and forget about tabs. The problem with tab is that you try it, it doesn't work, and you have to type some more, back and forth, back and forth. I'm not saying it's useless, just that it sometimes isn't much help.




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