[Novalug] Text User Interface (TUI) utilities for Linux and Windows -- WAS: Messed up file title problem

Peter Larsen plarsen@famlarsen.homelinux.com
Sun Mar 21 19:48:40 EDT 2010


On Sun, 2010-03-21 at 08:58 -0700, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> I will once again mention the TUI of Midnight Commander.  It's quick'n
> easy to pull up.  It's also available for Windows (getting a tad stale,
> but does work under Vista natively -- although Cygwin's version is also
> an option).

Many many moons ago I used "Norton Commander" which I think was the
first version of the extended shell for DOS. Back then I had my doubt
about it's value - too many crashes and the irritating popup of windows
over what I was doing on the command line. With REXX and other scripting
languages I soon found no need for that tool.

Personally, I prefer to either use my keyboard - and ONLY the keyboard -
to do my interaction, or if I go GUI, I want to primarily use only my
mouse and only use the keyboard when I need to key-in data. 

With bash's auto-complete (or bash-completion) feature I have everything
I need. The out-of-the-box functionality is very helpful, but it's just
a little bit of what bash-completion can do for you. It's VERY
configurable, and can be set to auto-complete: command-line options;
host names and context aware file filters. The secret to changing
behaviour for the auto-complete feature is the "complete" command. Check
out it's man page. You'll be surprise of how agile this feature is.

Here's a couple of examples:

ssh user@<tab>   --> list available hostnames ( from host file and other
configured sources)

cd ~<tab>    --> list available usernames

echo $<tab>   --> list available variables

And of course the default: ls /var/www/html/a<tab>   --> auto complete
if there's only one file that starts with a in /var/www/html; if you hit
tab twice, you get a list of the files that match a.

It does what "mc" was meant to do; to help you select files and relative
information on the OS. But it does it un-intrusive. It allows me to type
command-lines ONCE and very quickly as I auto-complete paths to
configuration files, for edits etc.

While writing this, I took a look at the configuration of the
bash-autocomplete, and to my pleasant surprise there's now svn and git
extensions with the auto-complete feature. 

> So, what other TUIs are people using out there?  I'll sometimes script
> something with whiptail.  Whiptail is the slang library replacement
> tool for dialog, which is for ncurses.  I believe mc also uses slang
> as well (and can be built for ncurses if slang isn't available?).

The good old $ prompt with the auto-complete feature; screen loaded on
remote systems. Bash keeps on improving; when-ever I review the bash
man-page every 6 months or so, I always discover a lot of new powerful
features. 


-- 
Best Regards
  Peter Larsen

Wise words of the day:
* LG loves czech girls.
 LG: do they have additional interesting "features" other girls don't have? ;)
	-- #Debian
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