gui

An UNIX-philosophy utility for standing up GUIs.

Warning

Not working yet, under development. The Tk programs producing the screenshots below have been hand-made, not produced by the gui utility. We're getting there!

Examples

Command	Result
gui 'label:"XYZ"'
echo Hello | gui label:STDIN
seq 100 | gui textarea:STDIN
gui 'textarea:FILE(x.txt)'
gui 'col:[label:"Your name:", input#name, button(onclick:#name->STDOUT):"Submit"]'

Dependencies

• Tcl/Tk 9
  • macOS: brew install tcl-tk
  • Linux: apt install tk

The language

The language is roughly similar to HTML: each element can contain attributes, an ID and a value.

Literals

Strings are specified in double quotes:

"Hello World"
"Multi\nline"
"With \"quotes\""

Integers are specified as numbers:

123
0

Basic Elements

Elements can be specified in several ways:

divider                 # Basic element
button#title            # Button with ID
label:"Hello World"     # Label with text
button(fgcolor:"red")   # Button with red text
label#title(fgcolor:"red"):"Hello World"  # Full label with ID, color and text

Attributes

Attributes are specified in parentheses after the element name, separated by a comma.

input(placeholder:"Enter text")
button(onclick:#name->STDOUT)
label(fgcolor:"red",onclick:"doSomething")

IDs

IDs are specified with a hash (#) after the element name:

input#username
button#submit

Lists

Lists are specified in square brackets with comma-separated elements:

col:[label:"Hello", input:"World"]
row:[button:"OK", button:"Cancel"]

Special Objects

There are special objects for I/O operations:

• STDIN - Reads from standard input
• STDOUT - Writes to standard output
• STDERR - Writes to standard error
• FILE(path/to/file.txt) - Reads from or writes to a file

Functions

Functions say which source should be sent to which destination, using the arrow syntax (->):

#name->STDOUT          # Send value of #name to STDOUT
"xyz"->#button         # Send the string to be the #button text
#textarea->FILE(x.txt) # Write the contents of #textarea to a file
"Bleh"->STDERR         # Send the string to STDERR

Supported Elements

Currently supported elements include:

• label - Displays text
• input - Single-line text input
• textarea - Multi-line text input
• button - Clickable button
• col - Vertical container
• row - Horizontal container

Examples:

label:"Static text"
input(placeholder:"Type here")
textarea:STDIN
button(onclick:#name->STDOUT):"Click me"
col:[label:"Name:", input#name]
row(gap:5):[button:"OK", button:"Cancel"]

TODOs

• JSON mode:

{
    "col": [
        { "label": "Your name:" },
        { "input#name": null },
        { "button": { "onclick": "#name->STDOUT", "value": "Submit" } }
    ]
}

• json expando tree view
• example of a wizard dialog
• example of plucking just some values from JSON
• document supported attributes and examples
• what about appending to a file?
• what about negative numbers