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Comment by Derbasti | Hacker News Reader

But where are the tools? Of course I can always write a shell script, but the vast majority of GUI tools is not programmable.

I would love to automate my image capturing workflows, my tax filing, my invoicing, my calendaring, my contacts, and SO many other things. But most tools are not scriptable. They are sealed, proprietary binaries that I can't interact with.

Conversely, I love tools like the shell, Emacs, and programming tools in general, because I can automate them. I can automate testing, compiling, generating reports... And if something is not built-in, these tools provide hooks and APIs to extend their functionality for my particular use cases.

In fact, we can already see the impact of smartphone-only students on their ability to grasp and automate complex workflows. The fact that mobile apps are largely non-composable and non-programmable seems to seriously limit students' abilities in general digital problem solving.

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the vast majority of GUI tools is not programmable

Start factoring "is this thing automatable?" in to your tooling decisions. The problem will resolve itself.

OTOH, almost all major OSes also have tools that let you automate stuff at the input layer, so you can automate any GUI tool. The difficulty comes with race conditions on inputs.

You could also directly twiddle the bits in RAM to automate stuff. I prefer using tools that were built with automation in mind.

Incidentally, hammerspoon [0] is pretty amazing if you're looking to automate MacOS stuff.

[0] http://www.hammerspoon.org/go/

Looks useful. I'd really like Siri integration. Actually, I'd probably want to say "Hammerspoon", then a menu would appear and I would say a keyword or a number.

A lot of polished produce lack this feature. You end up turning away a 90% solution for a 70% solution because the former isn't programmable. Emacs, for example, can easily become a maintenance nightmare.

AutoHotKey?

In some respects I think the apparent lack of automation in GUI comes down to the methods by which it's accomplished feeling too crude to take seriously. Even ordinary "power user" apps like Excel are so in-depth already and support so many workflows that it's hard to figure out the efficient path for what you want to do.

As someone with some potential admin work coming up, can anyone recommend some good cli tools for office work? I'd love to be able to take a word/libreoffice template and generate a document by supplying command line parameters for example.

> In fact, we can already see the impact of smartphone-only students on their ability to grasp and automate complex workflows. The fact that mobile apps are largely non-composable and non-programmable seems to seriously limit students' abilities in general digital problem solving.

Computers became so easy to use that no one learns how to use them. It's no wonder grandma always opens that attachment with an exe extension, file extensions have been hidden for as long as she's used computers, she doesn't know what the convey.

Teaching kids to code is the latest fad but I think the majority of them would be much better served learning some basic bash scripting and related unix tools.

Visual Basic for Applications. The Red programming language.

Is VBA good from the command line? I did a course on it ~10 years ago but it was always used from within applications.

Yes, you can run VBA from VBScript, Perl, etc. Basically any scripting language that can instantiate ActiveX VBA automation.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2050505/way-to-run-excel-...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27613878/list-of-perl-com...

Pandoc can generate and convert between various document types, including Office docs based on a template (although I haven't used the option myself, I just convert Markdown to PDF/HTML most of the time).

You use a scripting language - most languages have somewhat usable libraries for manipulating e.g. MS Office documents directly, not through the Office applications.

> I'd love to be able to take a word/libreoffice template and generate a document by supplying command line parameters for example.

Python with PyWin32 is great for this, the Word doc part anyway. I've got several scripts the create modify or read Excel and Word docs for a number of different purposes: tracking my mileage, automating creation of new users (now done with Powershell though), converting and uploading documents to a web server. VBA/VBScript can do some of these things too, but Python is a much more capable and sane language to use. Powershell is another great automation choice too.

Generate the documents in LaTeX?

python-docx allows you to generate Word files even on non-Windows platforms. Word 2016 says something about "converting" when it opens them, but they look OK. Apparently it will also let you modify them.

Someone else spoke about Python for Windows. That I have used with Excel but not Word. I imagine it would work pretty well, though.

My very old contribution to this debate is a term I am hoping to bring to the mainstream - topless computing.

(Things like GUIs try to put a top on our data. Like owning the customer. And we always want to do more than the person who sealed it shut thought of)

http://www.mikadosoftware.com/articles/topless_computing

I always remember being impressed by the Amiga and the ability to automate GUI applications with Arexx - I know OSX has Automator but apps don't seem to integrate as deeply (if at all) and Apple script feels nasty.

try HiveMind: http://www.crudzilla.com/

It self referencing and you can add your own changes to it to automate you specific tasks.

Doesn't Emacs itself have calendaring options? If you're already using it and like it for its scriptability, maybe you're a classic candidate to bloat up your Emacs a bit.

Eight Megs Always Constantly Swapping.

Hey, that'll fit on my Apple Watch. Emacs is quite small by today's standards.

Making Emacs a Lisp interpreter turned out to be a great idea. Too bad they didn't use Scheme or Common lisp.

Yes, the last part of my comment was a nod to that old chestnut.

On Apple and Windows we have Apple Script, COM, WPF Automation and quite a few other third party tools when the applications don't expose any kind of API.

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