Dialog or zenity

dialogguizenity

I am working on a project. I have two options for the GUI part.

Either use dialog or zenity.

I never used any of these tools before. I have to learn one of them. Suggest me which one should I learn and which will be more beneficial to learn? Which one is old and which one is new? Which one will you prefer?

Best Answer

It really depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

Dialog creates curses-based text dialog boxes that are accessible from the console. This is useful for adding some level of interaction to shell scripts. Dialog is older than the hills but still has its uses.
Zenity creates GTK-based graphical dialog boxes for use in a windowed GUI environment. This is useful for adding a few graphical touches to something that is running as a script but the user didn't run it from a text console and it needs some interaction. Zenity is a relatively new player but since it's distributed with Gnome it's widely available and stable.

There are of course other use-cases but the two tools are so fundamentally different that it's up to you to decide what you are trying to accomplish, then one tool or the other will be an obvious choice.

Related Solutions

Cron GUI Dialog – How to Display a Zenity Dialog After Root Cron Task Completion

Try adding something like the following to your ~/.xinitrc (or ~/.xsession if you use a login manager):

while true; do
    if [[ -a ~/.messages ]]; then
        zenity --info --text="$(printf "%q" $(cat ~/.messages))"
        rm ~/.messages
    fi
    sleep 10
done &

I haven't tested this with zenity as I don't have it and I'm assuming that .xsession works as expected - I've never used a login manager.

The while/done block will execute indefinitely with a ten second delay between checks (the sleep 10 part). Each time there's a check, the if guard succeeds if there's a non-empty file called .messages in the user's homedir. On success, the contents of the file are read into zenity and the file is removed.

I'm not thrilled with the printf vomit, but it should be fine.

The content that gets put into ~/.messages should be redirected from cron and you'll need to make sure you change the owner and group of the file appropriately. Perhaps something like:

10 * * * * /usr/bin/mything && echo "mything completed" > /home/username/.messages && chown username:groupname /home/username/.messages

Bash – how to make the bash script look 100% like a GUI app (so user never sees terminal)

I hope, that I understood you right: you need just a launcher to the existing script. If so, try to write a small .desktop file for your script and place it in ~/.local/share/applications or /usr/share/applications . Here is an example for it:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Sample Application Name
Comment=A sample application
Exec=application
Icon=application.png
Terminal=false

Further (if you want to write kind of installer) you can create it in installation script.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Cron GUI Dialog – How to Display a Zenity Dialog After Root Cron Task Completion

Bash – how to make the bash script look 100% like a GUI app (so user never sees terminal)

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