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Ask HN: Would building GUI's for CLI applications be very helpful?

2 points by Mandatum ↗ HN
Hi HN, I'm someone with quite a bit of front-end experience. I've built a few applications in my work where I've always had comments about how easy it is to use, as well as websites and done small bits of design here and there. I'm a security hobbyist and I've just switched over to Ubuntu on my desktop. As most of you would know, most security tools are written with CLI's in mind. This is likely to automate a lot of the tasks, and speed up workflows for the power users.

But from a usability point of view for beginners (I come from Windows 95 and Macintosh II, so I've always had a GUI) and the younger crowd, I think the barrier to entry for a lot of these tools would be lowered if they had a GUI.

Pretty much what I'm asking; is does HN think it would be helpful or beneficial to contribute to existing projects by building GUI's for them (or improving existing ones)? A good example I think is ZenMap GUI for nmap. Tools I have in mind are:

wpscan, joomscan, sqlsus, grabber, fimap, deblaze and BlindElephant (and improve wfuzz's GUI, forgot the name for that project though).

Also if you have any ideas for others let me know. I don't want to just limit this to security-related tools, if there's an everyday CL app you have in mind..

6 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 29.2 ms ] thread
charford
I'd be interested to see what everyone else has to say. But from my point of view, CLI will always be more efficient. Anything on top of that will only make accomplishing the task slower. Why would I use a GUI when I can automate the task with a script?

It depends on the user, but I find myself with multiple terminal windows open at a time throughout the day. Anytime I get stuck in a GUI app, I feel like I am wasting time.

Mandatum
This is really more aiming at people wanting to try these tools with no experience. Instead of having to go through commandline, typing out your (in some cases pretty big) cl arguments, in some cases having to figure out what each argument does (while scrolling constantly because the help text is 5 windows long).. You just start it up, populate a few fields and hit run.

Maybe I'm just being pedantic.

fl0wenol
What would be time better spent is a interactive tutorial on how to best use the CLI tool to do tasks.

If you're going to design a wrapper around tools, then make the wrapper purpose-driven (like Handbrake is to FFMPEG and a related suite of command-line tools and libraries), as opposed to trying to chase the tail of the dragon exposing the features of a moving target, probably poorly.

Mandatum
Hmm, you raise a good point about the moving target. Perhaps tutorials would be better suited.

Wrappers for a variety of applications already exist, and in some cases done really well (BurpSuite was the result of multiple smaller scripts.. I think). That could be a good path too, but will likely result in me maintaining software.

CyberFonic
I'm a *nix user from a very long way back. And I do use CLI for most stuff.

BUT when it comes to something that I only need to use/configure rarely, I find the man pages tedious to shift through, trying to find the exact combination of switches that do the desired job.

What I would find very useful is a GUI (HTML5/JS based please) that finds the appropriate command (apropos?) presents the options, validates my selection, i.e. don't allow incompatible switches, warn about nasty effects, etc. THEN ... generates the appropriate command line command in a window. I can choose to execute it or to copy and paste into some script.

Mandatum
OK, yeah that sounds usable. Just an HTML file with a little bit of javascript and help text. That's a really good idea.