How to make a Linux program in the Command Line Interface who display a nice user interface?
For example when I use "wget" to download a file from internet, I can see the download advancement in the Command Line Interface. How can I do that?
ncurses is a popular option, there are APIs for lots of programming languages.
Take a look at curses. It is a library for text based UI.
You can get a basic interface by using \r to go to the beginning of the current line.
Slightly more advanced is ncurses.
The next step up is Newt.
If you want to do a GUI for Bash scripts or to wrap around other command line utilities, you can use dialog (man page).
Here two great dialog tutorial to get you started :
Dialog: An Introductory Tutorial
Improve Bash Shell Scripts Using Dialog.
If you only need a progress bar, this can be done directly with a simple print (that prints the bar), followed by the carriage return character (ANSI character #13), which puts you back at the beginning of the line. The line can then be later updated by printing over it.
For more complicated needs, ncurses is indeed the standard way to go.
I wouldn't call wget's progress report as a 'nice gui', but anyway, the classic library for building graphical interfaces without X Windows is Linux and UNIX systems is ncurses.
Recently a C# version of ncurses has been started, check out details here
If you're using Mono, you could use MonoCurses
Try curses, it is a well documented API for text based UI.Also, there is so much open source projects that are using curses for you see and learn
wget does not really have a GUI, all I see is stuff that you can already achieve using stdout and echos (e.g. printf() or std::cout)
Anyways, for simple dialog boxes of the MessageBox kind, but not limited to that, also have a look at dialog
http://linux.die.net/man/1/dialog
http://hightek.org/dialog/
You can just use ANSI escape codes. A simple example in bash
echo -e "\033[H\033[2J \033[20;20H \033[4mThis is a underlined line.\033[0m"
One should mention FTXUI. Functional Terminal (X) User interface: A simple C++ library for terminal-based user interfaces!
Cross-Platform
Support for UTF8 and fullwidth chars (→ 测试)
No dependencies
etc
Related
I have an interest in playing and fuxing with prolog, I have installed the swi-prolog and added the repository, just in case anyone is interested on which one commands I used:
% sudo apt-add-repository ppa:swi-prolog/stable
% sudo apt-get update
% sudo apt-get install swi-prolog
How do I actually begin to write prolog codes on my linux machine? for my regular programming I use VIM to write/edit/debug and terminal to compile. Can I use vim to write prolog? How do i compile or use the prolog interpreter(i think that is what it is called)?
Yes, you can use any text editor, incl. VIM. Once you have written a Prolog source file, say, file.pl, you can load it into SWI-Prolog like so:
swipl -s file.pl
This will compile your file and take you to an interactive shell where you can then ask queries against the definitions in your file.
If you want to use your Prolog program in batch mode, you can use:
swipl -s file.pl -t goal
where goal is the goal/query you want to evaluate. Note that in this case you won't be getting the option to ask for alternative solutions.
On Ubunutu, I started off using emacs, which at least does syntax highlighting:
http://www.swi-prolog.org/FAQ/GnuEmacs.html
(2 emacs suggestions on that page ^)
But now I use prolog in anger, I use an Eclipse plugin called PDT:
http://sewiki.iai.uni-bonn.de/research/pdt/docs/v2.1/start
Especially useful is the real-time line by line debug and trace, so you can step into, step over individual predicates, monitor variables names etc.. just like an other real IDE you would find in eclipse.
Probably only worth installing if you're going to use it a LOT, since the install is a lot of work, but it's a great IDE.
But if you like your low level editors like VIM, you will have to use the debug and trace tools built into swi-prolog, see:
http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=debugger
To work out how the strange and beautiful prolog interpreter works, using a tracer of some kind is a must-have.
I personally use gprolog or swipl in the interpreted environment.
So you write facts and rules in a mydb.pl file, and open the interpreter in the same directory.
Once the prompt shows up you can query
['mydb.pl'].
for loading your database. now you can either see the warnings\errors or start querying from inside the prolog interpreter.
buddy I also use vim to edit prolog code, What I personally do is I save my prolog file with the '.pl' extension, and then on the terminal, I use prolog interactive environment to consult my file
e.g:
To initiate a prolog interactive environment just type On terminal:
prolog
Now that you have entered in SWI-prolog you can use 'consult' i.e pre-defined pseudo-predicates allow one to load Prolog code into a running Prolog interpreter:
?- consult("filename.pl")
that's it!
You can use any text editor to write your code. Just make sure to save your code with the .pl extension like fibo.pl.
After that open the terminal and go to the location where you have saved your code.
After that type prolog
After that write the name of your file without .pl extension and end it with . ['fibo']. and press return
Eg - cd /home/student/14917
prolog
['fibo'].
Here fibo.pl is my program name
I use SWI prolog with Sublime Text on mac. Works really nice. In Sublime Text you just hit cmd - B to run the code, and the output appears in a window within Sublime Text. There is a package for it here.
Does anyone know if there is a reader (text-to-speech) tool for cygwin or linux? I know of Microsoft's narrator, which partially works by sounding out what I type in the cygwin window (bash command line) but it doesn't report anything written to stdout.
Is there a native Cygwin tool anyone knows of?
BRLTTY, which is available through Cygwin's setup.exe, apparently does have some speech support in addition to being able to drive Braille displays. I've got no experience with it though.
BRLTTY seems to be just an interface for Braile displays - I couldn't make it "talk".
Instead get festival binary from bottom of here, put it in C:/festival, and in cygwin
echo "hello world" | /cygdrive/c/festival/bin/festival.exe --tts
should say hello world. Then I put it into a script say.sh and calling
~/say.sh hi
actually does what you'd expect :)
I have implemented a simple linux shell in c. Now, I am adding some features and one I immediately thought about was to be able to show the last commands with the up arrow.
Question 1:
However, I have no idea how to accomplish this. Do you?
Question 2:
Any comment on how to store the "history" commands are also appreciated. I suppose something like a queue which allows access to all elements would be a good idea. Am I wrong? Do I have to implement it or is there already some good implementation out there I should know about?
Thanks.
Build libedit or readline support into your shell.
If you want to be lazy, you can use rlwrap:
rlwrap prog
I wrote the shell for HelenOS. Grab the bzr repo and navigate to uspace/app/bdsh (bdsh stands for the (b)rain (d)ead (sh)ell).
Other contributors have since added line editing / history / tab completion to the functions that handle input. Its written purely in ANSI C, does not link against glibc and implements its own functions. The code (both in the shell and underlying HelenOS libc) is 3 clause BSD, you can use it in anything.
If nothing else, it might help to just examine the implementation to get started.
I'm writing a bunch of Linux shell scripts with complex selections. For now I use zenity for prompts. I'd rather use something where I can show more than one UI element at a time and query it in a script (e.g. a list and some checkboxed and a file picker and an entry field.
What are my options?
I believe GTKDialog comes with extended gtk-ified versions of the popular curses based dialog utility for shell scripts.
I'm not sure if it will serve the complexity of your needs, however. In any event, its a place to start.
You're going to have to move up to something more capable. PyGTK with Glade is fairly powerful, and Python is easy enough to pick up.
autoglade could also be of help to give your scripts of commands a graphical user interface, in many cases with no additional programming.
Some docs and tutorials can be found here.
zenity 3 now has a option to create a form with multiple elements. See the following bug report
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412493
Yad is a fork of Zenity that adds almost as much functionality as Gtkdialog. Mostly backward compatible too.
It needs to be graphical. No sed, awk, grep, perl, whatever. I know how to use those and I do use them now, but I need to cherry-pick each replace in 300+ files.
I want a tool where I can:
type a search string
type a replace string
select a directory and file extension
and it would recursively go into each file in that directory and its sub-directories, open it and scroll to the place where search string is and offer two options:
replace (and find next)
find next
Nothing more. Reg.exp. support is a plus, but not required.
SOLVED: Regexxer is exactly what I needed. In case someone needs it on Slackware, here's what you need to download and how to compile it (choosing correct version of each dependency can be a PITA)
I think regexxer is exactly what you're looking for:
Regexxer
regexxer is a nifty GUI search/replace tool featuring Perl-style regular
expressions. If you need project-wide substitution and you’re tired of
hacking sed command lines together, then you should definitely give it a try.
See also the screenshot, looks a lot like what you're describing:
Emacs + dired + query-replace-regexp
For complete recipe follow this link (it's rather long, covering all possible alternatives),
jEdit does exactly what you need. It is written in Java and works well in Linux, Windows and OS X (probably other operating systems also).
Lately Kate (if you use KDE) can do it, but in a very tricky way. Go to "Edit>Search in Files", and choose the folder within which your files exist.
The trick is that only after the search results appear, you will find a text box and a button called "Replace checked". This button will do what you want.
I use gVim for this task all the time. I open up all the files at once, then use the commands to perform a subsitution on each file, asking for confirmation. Generally I use < 20 files, so I open them as tabs and use this:
:tabdo %s/foo/bar/gc
gVim works fine on Windows :) My coworkers often use Textpad to do this same thing, but I'd say gVim is much more efficient at it.
If you are a KDE user there's also kfilereplace.