The Command Line GUIde: Graphical Interfaces from Man Pages via AI

TL;DR

The paper addresses the gap between powerful command-line tools and discoverability by automatically generating graphical interfaces from command documentation. It introduces GUIde, which uses AI to translate man pages into GUIde-lines, annotated grammars that drive bidirectional GUI and CLI synchronization. A multi-agent repair workflow refines these grammars into usable UIs, and an evaluation on 20 common commands demonstrates strong parseability with notable limitations on complex tools like find. The work shows that GUIde can streamline command usage for typical tasks, enabling intuitive exploration and modification of commands, with potential applicability to other structured text formats. The practical impact lies in making advanced CLI capabilities more accessible while preserving exact command-line control.

Abstract

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.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: GUIde automatically provides GUI interfaces for command line tools by translating man pages into specfications.
• Figure 2: GUIde interface, shown for a grep command.
• Figure 3: Automatically creating a GUIde-line from a man page.