Ubuntu – GUI to CLI command translator

bashcommand lineguiunity

Is there any application (or sequence of commands) for this function: seeing the result of the actions, while using a GUI interface, being automatically translated into a Terminal (or similar CLI environment) on the same machine.

I saw this in action long years ago in VBA for Applications (for example the Macros in Excel). I wonder if there is same function in Linux.

Best Answer

GUI actions often have no external replament

There is no general possibility to "listen" to GUI actions, and translate them directly to cli equivalents. On Linux nor on Windows.
In general only a small selection of the GUI actions is to be controlled by cli at all. The developer of the software in question will make a decision on what actions he or she thinks are useful to make available as a command "from outside", and we depend on API's, or those cli options the developer made available. Most of these commands, you will usually find in the man pages of an application. type:

man <application>

This does not mean we are totally helpless if no command is available, and to be able to control many things on our box, we have numerous tools, to at least "listen" to what happens, and replace the processes inside the application by our own designed commands, or our own scripted solutions.

What tool is useful in your case totally depends on the action you'd like to simulate. We'd need an additional question to point you in the right direction.

One (random, but extremely useful in many situations) option I'd like to mention though:

If we open a terminal, and run:
```
dconf watch /
```
We can exactly see what dconf/gsettings keys the (any) application is playing with, and we can directly run gsettings commands to do the same. With this command, we can practically see all actions different tweak tools apply.

Furthermore, many script languages have very powerful tools to control both hardware and edit files directly, but as mentioned, we'd need a more specific example to help you further with that.

Note

Another option you have, if you are more or less familiar with coding, is to look into the source code of the application. Especially interpreted languages will often be quite readable, to give you useful information.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Command line translator

perhaps you can try the python script found here. It uses the google translate API.

Edit: seems that that api is a paid service now. Maybe you can use the oneliner from commandlinefu

 translate(){ wget -qO- "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/language/translate?v=1.0&q=$1&langpair=$2|${3:-en}" | sed 's/.*"translatedText":"\([^"]*\)".*}/\1\n/'; }

Edit 2: try using libtranslate-bin available from the repositories

example usage:

 echo "hello" | translate-bin -f en -l

and to use google translate:

 echo "what are you doing" | translate-bin -s google -f en -t fr

and to convert kanji to romaji

echo "what are you doing" | translate-bin -s google -f en -t ja | iconv -f utf8 -t eucjp | kakasi -i euc -w | kakasi -i euc -Ha -Ka -Ja -Ea -ka

Ubuntu – How to run GUI applications as root

The issue with using a straight sudo nautilus is that it will sometimes try to use configuration files from your user's home directory. This can cause root (superpriviledged user) to change permissions on files within your home directory. This is not usually harmful long-term; it can cause annoying problems like refusing to login to your desktop, but you can usually restore previous configurations by typing:

sudo chown -R user:user ~/

So what gksudo and sudo -i do is simply to tell the program to run with either copies of .Xauthority and other configuration files or with ones that actually belong to root. I personally prefer sudo -i so I don't have to type in my password every time, but it's totally preference. The two commands are doing the same thing.