ast VS yad

I suspect the intended point of comparison is the monolithic Unix of old, where the entirety of the code of the system is (hopefully, ostensibly, allegedly) developed with a single vision, except for the applications in the narrowest sense of the word (e.g. the particular piece of numerics you need to design your airplane or whatnot, but not the editor you used to write it, the cluster scheduler you used to run it, the typesetter you used to write down your results, or the 3D viewer you used to present them).

One example that’s just plain interesting to read to see what things people were exploring (because, let’s admit it, historical Unix source gets plain boring after a while) is AT&T Research’s https://github.com/att/ast.

Aha, I shall have a dig through https://github.com/att/ast/tree/master/src/lib/libtksh then.

Thank you kindly.

Aside from the obvious uses - command line scripts - you can also do quite a bit with the GUI. Check out Yad for bash script GUI. X11 related tools like wmctrl, xdotool allow you to create spectacular scripts. I write and use numerous dynamic menus created with bash + jgmenu.

Are you referring to yad?

git clone https://github.com/v1cont/yad.git yad-dialog-code

yad - Program allows you to display GTK+ dialog boxes from command line or shell scripts. YAD depends on GTK+ only.

yad pushing your shell scripts to the next level via user inputs. For example i wrote a small script which lets me select an environment and an app and the url+port is written into the clipboard.

I make a lot of use of yad (which I think is in the standard repository) to give a GUI-like feel to my scripts. yad is a significant advance over zenity.

make a binding on an empty workspace that calls a yad script at the cursor

You might want to look at yad to add a GUI dialogue box to your script. Something like:

I like yad[0] for this. For example, I use it to present a GUI color picker to change/insert colors in Vim (via a plugin called vCoolor[1]). I also use it in some i3/sway scripts that need user input or to show a progress bar.

[0]: https://github.com/v1cont/yad

[1]: https://github.com/KabbAmine/vCoolor.vim

zenity should be a simple start https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/zenity (and apparently there is a fork too https://github.com/v1cont/yad but haven't tried it)