Where can I find a graphical command shell?

Question

Terminals and shells are very powerful but can be complicated to learn, especially to get the best out of them. Does anyone know of a more GUI based command shell that helps a user or displays answers in a more friendly way? I'm aware of IPython, but even the syntax of that is somewhat convoluted, although it's a step in the right direction.

Further to this, results could be presented graphically, e.g. wouldn't it be nice to be able to pipe file sizes into a pie chart?

Answer 1

Hotwire is an attempt to combine the power of the traditional command line interface with GUI elements. So it has a GUI side, and tries to be helpful in suggesting commands, and in showing you possible matches from your history. (While there are keyboard shortcuts to do this in bash and other shells, you have to know them ...)

You can use all your common system commands, but a number of key ones have new versions by default which use an object pipeline, and are displayed with a nice GUI view. In particular ls (aka dir) shows lists files and shows them in columns. You can sort by clicking on the column headers, double click on files to open, or double click on directories to move to that directory. The proc command allows you to right click on a process and one of the options is to kill it.

The object pipeline works in a similar way to Microsoft Powershell, allowing commands in the pipe to access object properties directly rather than having to do text processing to extract it.

Hotwire is cross platform (Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac), though it is at an early stage of development. To learn more, install (click on the link for your platform) and work through the simple getting started page.

If you don't like hotwire, you could also look at the list of related projects and ideas maintained on the hotwire wiki.

Answer 2

fish is a Unix shell that focuses on user-friendliness, such as by providing colored highlighting and extensive tab completion.

For a different kind of blend of textual and graphical interface, there's Quicksilver, as well as similar/inspired tools like Launchy, GNOME Do and ENSO.

Answer 3

Is this for Python in particular, or are you just interested in any command shell that has a GUI interface?

If the idea of piping file sizes into a pie chart interests you, you might try PowerGUI, a GUI layer on Microsoft's PowerShell command shell. PowerShell also lets you pipe data from commands into XML, CSV, and other formats that are understood by GUI programs.

Answer 4

GUI-based command shell seems like an oxymoron to me.

Not really? A command shell is just an encapsulated environment in which to execute commands. Why can't they have GUI extensions? We are in the 21st century! :)

Check out http://hotwire-shell.org/

This is along the lines of what I was thinking. It's a shame it uses PyGTK, I'd have preferred PyQT (perhaps a licensing issue?). There look to be some interesting related links from the project as well.

If the idea of piping file sizes into a pie chart interests you, you might try PowerGUI, a GUI layer on [...]

PowerGUI looks like a hobby project I've been working on that organises regularly used tasks. It looks like it organises frequent jobs and formats the output for you. The formatting I see as the end result of the data flow. But it would be nice to be able to tinker with data and then continue to use it.

PowerShell as a command shell is very forgiving for new users and is easy to learn. There is an add-on product (it is a commercial product) called PowerGadgets that would let you pipe file sizes into a pie chart or other types of displays

PowerGadgets looks very interesting. It would be interesting to have things like system monitors so that you could say, read the CPU usage per second and pipe it into a graph.

Is this for Python in particular, or are you just interested in any command shell that has a GUI interface?

Any really, currently, but I like the idea of cross platform, easy to edit, no compiler setup. I use Windows at work and Windows/Linux (Ubuntu)/OSX at home. Python is just an easy solution, and for writing stuff like this is has a lot of libraries already.

Thanks for all the links. Keep them coming. :)