What should a GUI do and how should it work
See original GitHub issueSince the beginning of this project there have been vague thoughts about it having a GUI, to help people who don’t use CLI.
It’s worth thinking exactly how a GUI should work and what it should do. This issue is for discussing that, any vague thoughts are welcome. I’m probably the least qualified person to understand since I’m personally very comfortable with CLIs, so I’d welcome thoughts from anybody.
Servers don’t have GUIs. Once a server is installed and configured then there is no user interface.
Maybe Electrum Personal Server doesn’t need a GUI but a setup wizard which provides a graphical interface for configuring the server and rescanning the Core wallet. It would ask the user to paste in xpub keys and other things (like the creation date of the earliest wallet, with a checkbox that says “this wallet has no transactions on it”)
It might be good to have a feature where the setup wizard tries to automatically find the bitcoin data directory, and read the rpc username/password from it or figure out the .cookie
file location.
The setup wizard could have tests like trying to connect to localhost:50002
to make sure everything is working.
One slight limitation is that Bitcoin Core itself lacks some GUI interfaces, for example users can’t enable pruning or configure the data directory location.
Issue Analytics
- State:
- Created 5 years ago
- Comments:19 (13 by maintainers)
I am mostly a Windows user and i usually prefer GUI over CLI. However, in this case, i also fail to see the utility of GUI for EPS. Even the setup wizard is only replacement for text editor. If the example config file is complete with detailed descriptions, usefulness of the GUI is somewhat doubtful.
Much more useful now would be to create executable files for Windows users, to remove the need to install python at all. If you add dependencies to GUI libraries, you will make the EPS installation a bit harder and this might discourge some people from using EPS and full nodes. So this is what i would consider a priority.
What about a TUI?
No need for external applications, no need for X tunneling (or VNC) if you’re running EPS remotely. The only problem is that it could scare off people that are not used to TUIs.
Could also include a setup wizard.