An improved GUI for cme and Config::Model

I’ve finally found the time to improve the GUI of my pet project: cme (aka Config::Model).

Several years ago, I stumbled on a usability problem on the GUI. Some configuration (like OpenSsh or Systemd) feature a lot of configuration parameters. Which means that the GUI displays all these parameters, so finding a specfic parameter might be challenging:

To workaround this problem, I’ve added a Filter widget in 2018 which did more or less the job, but it suffered from several bugs which made its behavior confusing.

This is now fixed. The Filter widget is now working in a more consistent way.

In the example below, I’ve typed “IdentityFile” (1) in the Filter widget to show the identityFile used for various hosts (2):

Which is quite good, but some hosts use the default identity file so no value show up in the GUI. You can then click on “hide empty value” checkbox to show only the hosts that use a specific identity file:

I hope that this new behavior of the Filter box will make this project more useful.

The improved GUI was released with Config::Model::TkUI 1.374. This new version is available on CPAN and on Debian/experimental). It will be released on Debian/unstable once the next Debian version is out.

All the best