OneFinger is a general-purpose GUI for composing CLI commands with the mouse. Although entirely graphical, it does not attempt to hide the underlying CLI language. Requires Python for Qt3.
OneFinger 1.0 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Well, the idea behind OneFinger is quite good, but its GUI needs to clean up things a bit, I think.
I could see it as being useful for disabled people. Check out dasher (dasher.sf.net redirect) for a good complement to this also. But typing with tab expansion is still faster. Some of the document centric ideas however would greatly speed up a command line interface.. and can be done to some end using shell completion rules. I’m all for automation, but for me, typing is a lot better than using a mouse.
/me pushes up his taped bridge glasses, snorts a little and exclaims “wow that’s cool”
That’s a really cool idea. Completing really long commands with lots of pipes sometimes takes a lot more than it should, even with tab completion.
OneFinger is a version for power users of the program Logical Desktop, by the same author: http://logicaldesktop.sourceforge.net (that’s a DE btw).
I don’t know. I type faster than i’m able to use my mouse…
I dont mind typing. This isnt for me (dont like mices)
however:
In case you missed the subject line, that is one awesome name. Great concept and so on….
Bravo!!!
This makes me wish I ran Linux. Hmm. Imagine that.
…and thanks Eugenia. The program has been out for a few hours, and you already know :-))
A tablet PC user wrote to me enthusiastically, saying the app changed his life. I didn’t even know what tablet PC were!
No reason why it shouldn’t work in Windows; Windows has a native version of PyQT availabe … problem is that you may have to get a licence for QT/Windows but I’m not sure.
This one’s definitely not for me. I hate those “recent documents” and “previously typed addresses” logs popping up everywhere. I don’t want programs to trace my activities and make statistics out of them.
Organizing my data myself (instead of letting programs organize it automatically) helps me to think more logically and it gives me a feeling of control, while these automatization programs make me feel that it’s the program that’s in control, not me. The thing is that using automatization programs you are not any more organizing your data in your own idiosyncratic way but, instead, you are organizing it the way that the designers of this automatization program think data should be organized.
Bookmarks and shortcuts are a different thing, because it’s me who makes them. Would you like some program to automatically remove all your rarely used bookmarks and shortcuts and make new ones without asking you first? This is the direction that MS Windows seems to be heading and I want nothing to do with it — I rather use some other OS where I can have at least SOME control over the system.
…i’ve seen on ‘the daily wtf’ a while ago…
the idea behind it might be good, but in my opinion the GUIs are so complex and not well structured, that you definitly will be searching options, programs, settings all the time, so it’s way easier to get back to the console, somewhen.
clean up the GUI and maybe it will be a useful tool.
Hello Paranoid, of course I respect your dislike about program that collect statistics, but sometimes it can be very useful. For example, we tend to use only a small fraction of the files in each directory. Very often, we only use a couple of directories. By presenting those few files before others, OneFinger improves your navigation speed a lot. It was surprising for me too.
Also, OneFinger (like nautilus) recalls the sorting mode of each directory separately. This is a very good thing because many directories only need one kind of sorting. But this too is taking statistics of your work.
This looks like a cool concept! I have some comments to the info at the web-site tough. The web-site claims that: “OneFinger increases your productivity over classical hand-typing, for the following reasons:”
And here are the reasons with my comments:
>* The commands you type in your terminal tend
> to be highly repetitive. OneFinger improves
> your productivity by “caching” them, so you
> never have to type the same thing twice;
> later, you can select them from a list
> (usually ordered by last usage time).”
What makes this different from reverse-i-search in bash(ctrl-r)? I really cannot imagine the GUI approach is faster even if it is using the “autocomplete style” used by reverse-i-search.
>* OneFinger has an integrated file browser
> that helps you insert filenames without
> typing them.
And this if faster than autocomplete because…?
>* OneFinger has a feature called “narrowing”,
> which allows you to see only those programs
> that make sense with a given file, or
> viceversa, only those files that make sense
> with a given program. In particular the
> first one (file –> program) is a key feature
> that current CLIs do not offer. This way it
> will be easier to select the right program
> than to type it.
Yes – this might be very usefull(but also very annoying if not maintained properly I imagine).
>* While bash is a task-oriented only language,
> OneFinger is both task-oriented and document
> -oriented.
What would be a typical example of this? The typical “doubleclick and open in default application”?
>* OneFinger collects statistics of your work: it
> can sort practically everything by recent usage,
> frequent usage, name, date and size. For example,
> the files in a directory can be ordered by recent
> usage. This is surprisingly useful, because you
> tend to use only a small fraction of the files
> in most directories. Furthermore, for each program
> you can have a list of recent arguments passed
> to it; you can have a list of recent directories;
> the programs can be ordered by recent usage,
> and so on. This way the average number of items
> you have to scan with your eyes is minimal.
ls can order its listing in very many ways as well
The recent arguments functionallity might be cool – but I’m not all that convinced.
>* Other than using the mouse, OneFinger allows
> you to type any piece of the command by hand
> —although in practice you will only do this
> when typing a program name for the first time.
Fair enough
>* OneFinger bridges the gap between CLI and
> graphical interfaces by giving you the best
> of both worlds: you can have total control
> over your system, without renouncing to the
> comfort of a point-and-click interface.
Yes – I agree that the concept is interesting because it might fill that gap. Personaly I don’t think I’ll ever use something like this(well – never say never), but a _lot_ of people might do. Good work!
Your Logical Desktop thing is even more interesting for me. This is something I could imagine to be useful for my mother. It doesn’t matter what she wants to do, she is starting everytime on the “wrong end”. A desktop which allows her to start exactly in the way her thoughts are going (I want to do this or that with a file / I want to start this or that application) could help her out a lot..
After looking for a program I remember seeing here some time ago(called segousoLand as I eventually found out), I found some examples of the document-orientation.
This is very much the same as “narrowing” alltogether AFAICS, but it is a cool feature. It would be interesting having something like this in the shell – I’m not sure how to go about it, but I guess it could be done.
your Logical Desktop thing is even more interesting for me. This is something I could imagine to be useful for my mother. It doesn’t matter what she wants to do, she is starting everytime on the “wrong end”. A desktop which allows her to start exactly in the way her thoughts are going (I want to do this or that with a file / I want to start this or that application) could help her out a lot..
Thank you. Unfortunately, I’m not so sure anymore. Even Logical Desktop can do what you say only up to a point. If your mother thinks “I want to count the words in this sxw documents”, she won’t find a verb. There are infinite number of tasks, and an infinite number of ways to express those tasks. The only right way to go is probably natural language understanding.
Is it just me or does this look like a more cumbersome version of Quicksilver?
http://quicksilver.blacktree.com
Not that I wouldn’t give a few toes for Quicksilver on a Linux machine
Hello there!
And here are the reasons with my comments:
>* The commands you type in your terminal tend
> to be highly repetitive. OneFinger improves
> your productivity by “caching” them, so you
> never have to type the same thing twice;
> later, you can select them from a list
> (usually ordered by last usage time).”
What makes this different from reverse-i-search in bash(ctrl-r)? I really cannot imagine the GUI approach is faster even if it is using the “autocomplete style” used by reverse-i-search.
Sorry I don’t know ctrl+r, however in OF you can have a list of the arguments used WITH A GIVEN PROGRAM.
>* OneFinger has an integrated file browser
> that helps you insert filenames without
> typing them.
And this if faster than autocomplete because…?
Autocomplete makes you continuously scan the possible completions to find the disambiguating character. This means parsing filenames yourself: it is difficult. Also, if a file contains spaces, it’s doubly painful: most of the time the character to complete is a backslash.
Furthermore, sometimes you know you used the file just one second ago, and would like to just click it, but bash forces you to type its name.
>* OneFinger has a feature called “narrowing”,
> which allows you to see only those programs
> that make sense with a given file, or
> viceversa, only those files that make sense
> with a given program. In particular the
> first one (file –> program) is a key feature
> that current CLIs do not offer. This way it
> will be easier to select the right program
> than to type it.
Yes – this might be very usefull(but also very annoying if not maintained properly I imagine).
I don’t know if it would be useful for bash.
>* While bash is a task-oriented only language,
> OneFinger is both task-oriented and document
> -oriented.
What would be a typical example of this? The typical “doubleclick and open in default application”?
no. If you click a file first, the program list is narrowed to show only the programs that make sense. You can still choose it.
Organizing my data myself (instead of letting programs organize it automatically) helps me to think more logically and it gives me a feeling of control, while these automatization programs make me feel that it’s the program that’s in control, not me. The thing is that using automatization programs you are not any more organizing your data in your own idiosyncratic way but, instead, you are organizing it the way that the designers of this automatization program think data should be organized.
Dude, you’ve got issues. Applications that remember what you do aren’t spying on you. All they’re doing is automating and improving on the concept behind things like a command-line history.
You seem to be sacrificing one of the primary reasons for using computers – letting them take over the boring grunt work via automisation and data analysis – in preference to doing it youself just so you can ‘feel more in control’.
Bookmarks and shortcuts are a different thing, because it’s me who makes them. Would you like some program to automatically remove all your rarely used bookmarks and shortcuts and make new ones without asking you first?
Delete them ? No. Hide them away so they don’t clutter the screen ? Most certainly.
A UI that learns your habits and work patterns, then streamlines itself to your common tasks is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the holy grails of HCI research. I don’t mind if it takes me 5x as long to find something I only use once a month if it means I can complete the dozens of basic, repetitive tasks I perform every day 2x quicker.
That’s what those ‘learning menus’ in newer version of Windows and Office, etc try to do – only present the options you use the most so accessing them is faster. Given a week or two of usage, the ‘new’ Start Menu in XP is much faster to use than the ‘old’ one in earlier versions (unless you spend quite some time customising the old one).
Optimise for the common case. It’s a pretty basic rule of efficiency.
This is the direction that MS Windows seems to be heading and I want nothing to do with it — I rather use some other OS where I can have at least SOME control over the system.
You may feel that personally customising yourself a ‘new’ GUI instead of just learning how to effectively use an existing one makes you more efficient. Possibly, it does. Most likely, it does not. Averaged over all the computers you’ll ever use and taking into account time lost customising, it’s almost a dead certainty it won’t.
A UI that learns your habits and work patterns, then streamlines itself to your common tasks is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the holy grails of HCI research. I don’t mind if it takes me 5x as long to find something I only use once a month if it means I can complete the dozens of basic, repetitive tasks I perform every day 2x quicker.
Fine. As long as there are alternatives available for us who don’t like these automatization features. My point is that not all end users may like this direction in UI development as much as you do. 😉
Dude, you’ve got issues. Applications that remember what you do aren’t spying on you.
You’re quite right. The information gathered from your computer can only become harmful if it falls into malicious hands. And that cannot happen — or can it?
(Just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you too!)
Dude, you’ve got issues. Applications that remember what you do aren’t spying on you. All they’re doing is automating and improving on the concept behind things like a command-line history.
Exactly. In the case you aren’t root on the system the sysadmin is able to log that anyway so doing it yourself or not doesn’t contribute to security. In the case it is your desktop, it is only you who’s able to see it given its only in your home directory. If you feel you’re somewhat insecure then make sure nobody from the outside is able to get local user access to your account, or root access. You could even encrypt your home directory if you’re Paranoid. In short, not allowing this to happen only means you’re defeating a sympton (in both situations described here above), not an actual problem.
Even Logical Desktop can do what you say only up to a point. If your mother thinks “I want to count the words in this sxw documents”, she won’t find a verb. There are infinite number of tasks, and an infinite number of ways to express those tasks. The only right way to go is probably natural language understanding.
Not really, there are alternatives: a feature database. It’s just that such is huge work. One could start with basic things, such as MIME. SXW document; okay, what’s used on this system to open such files? Check out MIME settings then. After that do either: 1) Check the feature database which application is able to do what. 2) Open the specified document with one of the applications able to open it.
I think a program like this has a lot potential and not only because you argue its better than CLI. Rather, especially as being included in a “newbie OS”, or as “learning curve”, or as “learning the CLI” including being linked to as a program able to do. Heck, perhaps one of those “newbie distributions” would even support you (financially or otherwise).
Glad we finally got a link on this. It looks awesome. Not sure if I’d use it right now, but I’m gonna have to play with it anyway. I almost broke my arm last night, if I had of this would have been a -very- useful thing to have. Thanks for the mention of Logical Desktop – I’ll have to go check that out, too. Keep up the good work!
Ooohhh, innovation. Me like a lot.
Could use a little optimising. Like, starting with a list of every command available, and not be able to navigate it by mouse is a bit off-putting. (May I suggest you trawl ~/.bash_history for commands/arguments/files and break up long lists alphabetically?)
No way to hide hidden files or go up a directory in the file tree (unless I’ve missed it).
While the program should obviously aid common tasks, it shouldn’t be very hard to do things you’ve never done before.
All that said and I’ve only played with it for a couple of minutes. It looks really cool.
I was about to complain that OneFinger looked a lot like SegusoLand, but this is also yours! Sorta like generation 2?
^________^
Ciao Seguso, e buon lavoro!
I dunno about path names being quicker to browse than type. Especially since pressing TAB within BASH allows path names to be written blazingly fast. It does require you know where you are going though
To Michael: Great the idea about parsing .bash_history. I’ll implement it! I’ll also add a button “parent folders” to solve the other problem. Please join the mailing list, you seem to have useful ideas 🙂
To Dave: try the program for at least one week. Get used to it. Then tell me if you are still of the same opinion. Thanks 🙂