Cuiterm 0.9.9 review

Cuiterm is a CUI (Composite User Interface) terminal. CUI (Composite User Interface) is a compound type of user interface which in

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 1487K Developer: Laszlo Pere

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Cuiterm is a CUI (Composite User Interface) terminal.

CUI (Composite User Interface) is a compound type of user interface which incorporates the features of the GUI (Graphical User Interface) and the CLI (Command Line Interface) by realizing both interface in one area at the same time.

It is absolutely substantial that the CUI contains GUI elements and control language in the same area of the screen at the same time, so the incorporation is complete. CUI is not an optional, alternatively selectable combination of the two communication method but a truly new approach.

An other relevant feature of the CUI method is that it uses generated commands. When the user activated some GUI part of the user interface an automatically generated command appears to complete the task so the user can observ how the CLI part of the user interface can be used.

The cuiterm is a pilot application for the CUI methodology made to demonstrate the power of the composite user interfaces. As terminals are usually used with some shell to start simple UNIX utility programs, the Cui library can be considered as a composite user interface for the shell and some UNIX utilities. The following screenshot shows the starting screen of the cuiterm.

How to use it?

To test the composite user interface first you have to download the cuiterm and and install it. After the installation is complete the program can be started with the cuiterm command.

When the terminal emulator started it can be used the usual way by typing commands into it. Some programs and some complex commands are interpreted by the terminal and colorized (see the list below). For these commands the screen should have active areas usable with the left mouse button by double clicking on them. The output of some programs have floating menus with context sensitive functions. The menus can be accessed by the right mouse button. Some parts of the screen can be used to fire up a text entry field by holding down the left mouse button.

The following list contains some interpreted and processed commands that are worth trying.

ls -l and some variants of it
df
who
w
ps aux
stat
finger
cat /etc/fstab

What's New in This Release:
This version contains new features, including an automatic GUI generator which creates dialog boxes from manual pages, a working progress bar, enhanced size bars, and some new command parsers.
The drag and drop, the speed of the terminal, and the existing parsers were also enhanced.