Part of how it works – on Unix, command arguments are just a list of strings, and any option parsing (etc.) has to be done by the code of each command. At the command prompt, you type a command name then press a function key and it brings up a (text-mode) fill-form UI you can use to specify command arguments. IBM i (previously called OS/400, the operating system of the IBM AS/400) has a similar feature. (1) Console only, which used your Mac display as one big terminal, (2) GUI using X, which used the Mac display as as an X server, and (3) System 7, which ran a modified Mac System 7 on top of Unix, with System 7 having control of the GUI, and had a Mac terminal program that could run Unix processes. The Commando dialog would show you the command being constructed, and if you accepted it that would be entered into your terminal. These things would be organized into sensible groups.įor complex commands like cc, there would be buttons that invoked subdialogs such as a dialog for code generation settings, a dialog for warning/error settings, and so on. The dialog box would have check boxes or radio buttons for the various available flags, text boxes for arguments, buttons to invoke file choosers for stdin, stdout, and stderr, and probably more that I'm forgetting. If you typed the name of a command, such as ls or sort or cc, and then typed an ellipsis (…) it invoked Commando which would put up a dialog box for constructing the command. Commando was a nifty thing in the terminal program under the System 7 environment. One thing from A/UX that would be nice to add to the GUIs of current Unix/Linux systems is Commando.

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