ideas for command line behavior

[xorond]

currently we have the following options for showing stuff in general: view, list, show, 'showall'

i'm thinking we can put all of this together in one command with positional arguments to make it more intuitive to use (passing flags would feel weird to regular users, constructing a sentence-like command structure would be more user-friendly i think).

i've done similar work on the add command, getting rid of the flags for '-c / --category' or '-d / --description' by replacing them with positional arguments so right now it's like this:

usage: surelock add [-h] [-f FILE]
                    [category] entry [username]
                    [description [description ...]]
surelock add: error: the following arguments are required: entry

an example:

./surelock.py add uni uspace my_uspace_username change this password every year for security
Type your passphrase: 
Retype your passphrase: 
Password for uspace:

and the result:

./surelock.py showall

Category: root
  Site: facebook        Username:                 Description: 
  Site: github          Username:                 Description: 
  Site: testsite        Username:                 Description: 
  Site: justanentry     Username:                 Description: 
Category: uni
  Site: uspace          Username: my_uspace_username Description: change this password every year for security

/surelock.py view uni uspace                                    
Type your passphrase: 
this is fake obviously

can we do this similarly for the view option, and make it the only option for viewing things in general? (single passwords, list of all entries in all categories like in showall, and just a list of all categories maybe with [n] next to them, indicating the number of items inside)

[Alex6312]

With these changes to the add function you cannot add a description unless you specify a category. I think most regular users using the command line interface would save all their passwords in root, to keep the commands short. (If you save all your passwords in root you dont have to specify the category when you retieve them. In my opinion the ability to add passwords to different categories is only there to ensure compatibility to databases generated in the GUI, therefore I implemented it with flags.
The same reasons apply to the view command.
If you want I can combine list, show and showall to one function. However to keep the commands simple view should still be a seperate option.

[xorond]

72114b7

[xorond]

now we have: show and view, but honestly i still don't like it this way.

how about we just have show, and make it so:

usage: surelock show [-h] [-c] [-f FILE] [category] [entry]

positional arguments:
  category              name of the category
  entry                 name of the entry

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -c, --list_categories
                        list all categories
  -f FILE, --file FILE  name of the database file

so we would be able to do also:
./surelock.py show social facebook and therefore replace the view function as well..

what do you think?

[Alex6312]

The main drawback of the proposed behavior is that you always have to specify the category, even if you want to view a password from the default category (root).

[Alex6312]

I just added support for categories with spaces like 'Uni Wien' to the sql functions. This works great with the GUI, but is not compatible with the command line interface at this time. Should we switch back to flags to ensure compatility? (The first argument could still be a positional one but the rest would have to be flags.) The functions add, view and del would require a flag for the argument category. The function add would require a flag for the argument username.

[xorond]

Should we switch back to flags to ensure compatility? (The first argument could still be a positional one but the rest would have to be flags.) The functions add, view and del would require a flag for the argument category. The function add would require a flag for the argument username.

i'm not that big of a fan when it comes to flags. i like the current positional behavior of the commands, as they are easy to construct and have a sort-of grammatical structure.

[xorond]

The main drawback of the proposed behavior is that you always have to specify the category, even if you want to view a password from the default category (root).

hmm yeah that's true. maybe we should have gone for rowids or instead use a kind of unique id (independent from rowid) for each entry? as in, no matter which category, we do uniqid + 1 for the next entry.

so it could be like, social has 1, 3, 4 and banking has 2, 5 for example. depending on when the user added them

[Alex6312]

I'm not a fan of flags either, but right now the GUI can add entries like named "Uni Wien Webmail" or "Uni Wien Uspace" and the command line interface cannot parse these entry names because they have spaces. I don't konw how to solve this problem without flags. But i think we need to solve it to ensure compatibility between GUI generated databases and the command line interface.