gcli's Introduction

GCLI - Graphic Command Line

Bug reports: http://j.mp/gclibug
GCLI in Firefox: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/GCLI
GCLI on the Web: https://github.com/joewalker/gcli/blob/master/docs/index.md

GCLI is a graphical command line component. It is being integrated with Firefox developer tools and with editors like Orion and Ace. It can be embedded in web pages and JavaScript applications.

Why?

Command lines have advantages over graphical UIs in speed of entry and the ability to contain an almost unlimited set of commands without becoming cluttered. On the other hand GUIs typically come with better discoverability. GCLI is an experiment to see if we can improve the discoverability of command lines whilst retaining the speed and powerful command set of traditional CLIs.

There are a number of problems with the design of traditional command lines:

They assume a curses-style 80x24 (or similar) character array for output. Even system consoles are capable of graphics these days. It ought to be possible to have richer output.
They assume serial access to the output - one command at a time. This made sense when multi-tasking was expensive, however with modern processors single-tasking is starting to look expensive.
They are so loosely coupled that the integration is typically nothing more than argv/stdout/stderr/stdin. That level of integration made sense on memory constrained devices, but with more resources, we can provide much richer integration.

Getting Started

$ git clone git://github.com/joewalker/gcli.git
$ cd gcli
  -> Load index.html into your web browser (except Chrome)
For Chrome:
  install node (http://nodejs.org/download/)
$ npm install .
$ node ./gcli.js
  -> Load http://localhost:9999/

When you see the ':' prompt, type 'help' to see a list of commands.