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EveryGUI - UNIX Commands by the Click of a Button

Name:	Jeffrey Bakker
Date Posted:	Jan 29, 2006
Rating:	4.0 out of 5
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Now anyone can harness the power of the UNIX command line with a few clicks of a mouse.

Since my game plan is still on hold, I've had to keep myself busy with other things lately. In the process of designing m2dui (a GUI for map2dif), I realized that I design a lot of GUI programs for command line tools, which all have the same general idea - to run the command with the specified options...

..this is when I came to the conclusion that I should make a single GUI for pretty much "everything". So, I went about to design EveryGUI. EveryGui provides two applications: Chameleon, which is a dynamic GUI for virtually any tool or OS command, and Designer which is a visual environment for editing config files that determine Chameleon's different behaviours for each tool/command.

More information available at the official website:

http://everygui.sf.net

Recent Blog Posts

List:	01/29/06 - EveryGUI - UNIX Commands by the Click of a Button 12/19/05 - Released GTK+ Map2Dif User Interface for Windows/Linux 10/20/05 - Plan for Jeffrey Bakker

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Cholly (Jan 29, 2006 at 08:21 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Jeffrey this is brilliant. I work with Linux and Unix at my day job and I'm going to show this to our QA automation guys. I've always wondered why there wasn't a standardized way to link up the GUI with the command line.

Jesse (Midhir) Liles (Jan 29, 2006 at 08:59 GMT)

Jeffrey, you da MAN! This is quite possibly the coolest idea since X Window.

James Urquhart (Jan 29, 2006 at 09:06 GMT)

Nice idea, Jeffrey.

It would be even better if you had some sort of interface for combining commands - for example, constructing something like this:

firstapp | secondapp -option | thirdapp < textfile.txt

A bit like, say, the way you group actions together in Automator.

However, as your program stands, it is still a pretty nifty and useful tool :)

Ben Garney (Jan 29, 2006 at 20:31 GMT)

Awesome idea, and a solid execution. Nice job, Jeffrey. :)

abc (Jan 29, 2006 at 21:19 GMT)

I once had an idea like this of running shell commands from a browsable interface, but mine was still using the terminal and curses. The idea was more about making a complete shell than to focus on the running commands-part, which had I continued would have ended in something similar. I also had plans for using the piping system as mentioned above. I stopped because it was very difficult and I didn't have a clear vision.

Now that this is here, I'll probably start using it. :)

Matt Harpold (Jan 29, 2006 at 22:08 GMT)

Hmm, is there any chance of a windows binary for this?

Jeffrey Bakker (Feb 01, 2006 at 01:48 GMT)

Thanks for the kind words everyone.

@James Urquhart: In EveryGUI's current form, combining programs like that is already possible (partially). You can use Designer to create your command like so:

firstapp | secondapp $options | thirdapp $infile

This will work as expected. I use the word "partially", because $options can only be applied to one of the three apps. In future releases, it may be possible to have the options split between different apps in a command.

@James W. Hofmann: A curses-based program like this would be totally bad-a$$. A lot of remote admins logged in via ssh would definately benefit from it. Although there is a very good web based system administration tool called webmin. But yeah, it would be cool to have a curses tool like that, it's too bad you stopped the project. :(

@Matt: There were plans for a Windows release at first, but when it came closer to release status, I couldn't think of much EveryGUI definitions for Windows commands to design and distribute with it. Most common MS-DOS commands either are already covered by Windows explorer and other tools or wouldn't benefit much from a GUI. Definitions for external or "third-party" commands would have to be changed per user for their installation paths. There may be a Windows-specific release in the future. When and if there is, I'll post about it here.
Edited on Feb 01, 2006 02:28 GMT

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