The Command Line GUIde: Graphical Interfaces from Man Pages via AI
This addresses usability issues for command line users by making powerful tools more accessible, though it is incremental as it builds on existing AI and interface design methods.
The paper tackles the problem of command line tools being difficult to use due to textual syntax and documentation, by automatically generating graphical interfaces from man pages using AI, resulting in a system called GUIde that offers thorough graphical interfaces for real-world tasks.
Although birthed in the era of teletypes, the command line shell survived the graphical interface revolution of the 1980's and lives on in modern desktop operating systems. The command line provides access to powerful functionality not otherwise exposed on the computer, but requires users to recall textual syntax and carefully scour documentation. In contrast, graphical interfaces let users organically discover and invoke possible actions through widgets and menus. To better expose the power of the command line, we demonstrate a mechanism for automatically creating graphical interfaces for command line tools by translating their documentation (in the form of man pages) into interface specifications via AI. Using these specifications, our user-facing system, called GUIde, presents the command options to the user graphically. We evaluate the generated interfaces on a corpus of commands to show to what degree GUIde offers thorough graphical interfaces for users' real-world command line tasks.