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.

翻译：尽管诞生于电传打字机时代，命令行界面在20世纪80年代的图形界面革命中幸存下来，并延续至现代桌面操作系统。命令行提供了计算机上其他方式无法访问的强大功能，但要求用户记忆文本语法并仔细查阅文档。相比之下，图形界面允许用户通过控件和菜单直观地发现并调用可能的操作。为了更好地展现命令行的强大功能，我们提出一种通过人工智能将命令行工具文档（以手册页形式）转换为界面规范，从而自动创建图形界面的机制。利用这些规范，我们面向用户的系统（称为GUIde）以图形方式向用户呈现命令选项。我们通过对一系列命令生成的界面进行评估，以展示GUIde在多大程度上为用户的实际命令行任务提供了全面的图形界面。