hi, after reading again how much hatred some people have against the commandline, even though they have never used it, (the comment was along the line of: clicking ok 100 times is more productive than having to remember cryptic commands)
i started wondering: why could that be? why do we have to remember all those commands? or do we? well, there is command completion, but if you don't know what letter the command starts with, it does not help you much. all other arguments aside, there is something easier about being able to browse commands in a meny system where they are grouped by category. and then i thought, why not implement a menu system using tab completion. it would actually not be hard to do, because there is a freedesktop.org xdg menu structure where installed applications register themselves with a category. this system (at least as implemented in debian) supports generating menus for various applications by having the application drop a script in /etc/menu-methods/ it should not be hard to exploit that for fish. at the most simple level i thought of a function run, against which a set of completions is created that at its top level gives you a sort of menu: > run<tab> Accessibility Debian Education Graphics Multimedia Other Accessories Development Games Internet Office System > run O<tab><tab> and get a list of office applications in the end you may have: > run Office oowriter file and run will start oowriter for you... of course, making the menu a top part of the command completion list instead of requiring run, and instead having maybe functions for each top level menu entry so that you can run: > Office oowriter file would be nicer, but i don't knowif it is possible to get the menu onto the top of the completion list. i started looking into what's needed to write this script, but i am very busy with other stuff (book publishing (almost done :-), moving (this weekend), pike conference (next week)) so that i won't have time for this right now, but i don't want the idea to get lost, so i'll share it here. greetings, martin. -- cooperative communication with sTeam - caudium, pike, roxen and unix offering: programming, training and administration - anywhere in the world -- pike programmer travelling and working in europe open-steam.org unix system- bahai.or.at iaeste.(tuwien.ac|or).at administrator (caudium|gotpike).org is.schon.org Martin Bähr http://www.iaeste.or.at/~mbaehr/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Fish-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fish-users
