unc.1658: UNIX objections: WHAT I WANT

[utzoo!decvax!duke!phs!dennis]

You do NOT have to rewrite all the commands to get a menu-driven
user interface.  A menu program which can get to enough information
about commands to generate valid argument lists will do the job.
I imagine (that's about all the effort I've put into this)
that something very similar to a makefile (either one BIG one
for all of /bin, /usr/bin, and so forth, or one for each command
thus accessible) could contain enough information to do the job
properly.  These descriptions would form the syntax portion
of the program's documentation, and it should be possible to have
these printed intelligibly at any point, as a help feature.

Now, there ARE obvious exceptions; commands like find are incredibly
tedious to build up a command line for in a menu-driven system.
You can generate templates for various operations (ie, file name x*x,
all files older than x/y/z, and so forth), and string them together,
but it's pretty painful.

NOTE:  Do NOT take this argument to mean that I agree with
the ideas in the original article;  I've used menu-driven
systems, and the only one which I though had done the job right
was PLATO (tm?).  Their take on the experienced user who doesn't
want to see the menu every time is to enable deeper menus
to erase the previous one before it filled the screen.
Thus, if you knew what you wanted, you could just type it
while a bunch of fragmentary menus flashed by.