command prompter

[Terrence Enger]

On Fri, 2009-10-02 at 15:04 -0400, Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Oct 2009, Terrence Enger wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 2009-10-02 at 13:41 -0400, Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:
> > > On Fri, 2 Oct 2009, Terrence Enger wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Greetings,
> > > > 
> > > > I am used, working on another platform, to having a tool which relieves
> > > > of the need to remember command line parameters ... sort of an entry
> > > > panel with brief prompts and hyperlinks to the applicable part of the
> > > > man page.
> > > > 
> > > > Is there such a tool for GNU/Linux?  Nothing applicable jumped out at me
> > > > from the first hundred results of a google search for linux command
> > > > prompter.
> > > > 
> > > > If this does not already exist, is there anybody else who thinks maybe
> > > > it should?  If anybody expresses an interest, I shall put together an
> > > > example of what it might do for you.
> > > 
> > >     You could do it with bash's completion functions.
> > > 
> > 
> > Does that know anything about the paramaters needed for particular
> > commands.
> 
>    You would have to program them, just as would have had to be done
>    for other platform.

That is what I suspected.  Command completion is wonderful, but not
quite magic <grin />.

Any new tool must provide enough benefit without too much data entry,
and it must be sufficiently robust to continue providing benefit after
small changes in documentation of the prompted command.  Right now, I am
trying to a feeling for what might be "enough" or "too much".

> 
> >  For example, it is not long since I went to `man find` for a
> > reminder that I wanted to specify argument -wholename instead of -name,
> > the latter being what my fingers unhelpfully remembered.
> 
>    For a list of operands:
> 
> man find | grep '^ *-'
> 

Oh, I am gonna remember that trick.  It beats a search within `less` by
leaving hints in front of you on the screen, and quite often a quick
reminder is all it takes.  In either place, the search is subject to
false hits when the body of an explanation just happens at the beginning
of a line to refer to an argument.

Meanwhile, I have started a mockup (and I am learning things I never
knew about `cp`, and I am relearning lots of things I have forgotten
about html), so I shall keep plugging a bit longer.

Cheers,
Terry.


--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists