Thursday, 29 January 2015

Find zen for your users with Zenity

"That is a great program you made for us but we don't like that command line thing. Can you make it a GUI?" To which you reply, "Why yes I can. Just give me a few minutes."

Shell scripts are great. You have all the power from thousands of Linux commands that you can connect together to make the most impressive scripts since the ENIAC. No matter how great your scripts are there will be users that just don't like it because of the command line.

You have three options:  create a web server interface,  re-write it as a binary with graphical objects or use pre-existing dialog tools to add GUI features to your program. Zenity can do that for you.

There are a few dialog tools like zenity, kdialog, xdialog and may more. They are not very hard to use and can provide a lot of helpful iteration with things like information boxes, input boxes, selections and radio buttons.


zenity --entry --text "Please enter your name"

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