this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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This reminds me of something from my ancient past. Back in the early-ish days of Apple, there was a development system called MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Workshop) which included its own little kludgy shell.
The weird thing about it though was while you could enter commands on the command line like in any shell, you could prefix them with the word
commando(presumably a portmanteau of "command" and "window") and this window would pop up showing various buttons, checkboxes, etc. correponding to command line options. When you ok'd the window, it would generate the command line for you.I'm rather hazy about how all this worked, but I think there was some sort of template language to define the window layout if you wanted to add commando support for your own tool? And presumeably, as you say, you could restrict what's possible with the window interface as you deemed fit?
Seems like what I was roughly thinking of. I guess it fell into obscurity for good reasons, but I do think this kind of tool would be great for some edge-cases - that is, you cannot yet avoid terminal.
The thing about the MPW Shell is it was sort of the only game in town if you actually wanted a command line with the classic Mac OS. (There's an awesome little emulator called SheepShaver if you ever want to explore it btw.) Well, I suppose there was A/UX. I thought it was a miracle when that came out. You have to realize in those early days a good chunk of the operating system itself was actually baked in to ROM. (You had to do desperate things to squeeze a GUI out of such limited resources as existed back then!) So to this day I have no idea how they managed to spin off a 'nix despite that.
Anyways. I wonder, if you made some sort of template format today, to what extent you could write some sort of conversion tool that would scrape a man page or whatever to rough it in and then you could tweak it to get what you want? man pages aren't super standardized in their format I guess, so it's probably more trouble than it's worth. I like to use Python's
argparsewhen rolling out scripts myself, and its--helpformat is pretty rigid given that it's algorithmically generated. Might be more plausible with something like that? I had a quick look just now to see if you can drill down into theargparse.ArgumentParserclass itself to pull out the info more directly, but it seems a rather opaque thing that doesn't expose public APIs for that. Oh well…