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1.does such a project exsist?
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If I understand you correctly, yes
There are at least two:
Tk toolkit and
wxPython.
Tk can work with Perl, Tcl, and Python
wxPython only works with Python
There may be a generic toolkits that hook into bash or other native shell scripting, but I'm not familiar with them.
To answer your original question though:
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Why port your cmdline apps to gui if you can write a script that draws a gui on top?
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It's a question of performance. No matter how much you poke, twist, or tweak a script, it will
never perform as efficiently as a compiled program. If the application that needs a GUI is relatively complex (lots of options/switches), then just slapping a script-based GUI on top might be sluggish. It just depends. A lot of people will use scripting to create a prototype GUI. They do it to experiment with component placement, organization, etc. When they're happy, they could use that as a guide for building a compiled app. They could also sit there and say the script-based GUI is "good enough."
Personally, I prefer compiled GUI interfaces. Simply because controlling a GUI can get ridiculously complicated: This button is enabled when this other combination of components are selected, but that can only happen if some other options are filled out, and another component is active, etc. All that stuff needs to be checked each time the window is updated. That means you take the performance hit of an interpreted script language for every refresh.