http://www.osnews.com/story/20882/Zenity_Shell_Script_Interaction_Via_the_GUI Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Sun, 06 Dec 2009 18:20:17 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?346266 http://osnews.com/thread?346266 It's a tool to show simple dialog boxes from the terminal. These tools have been around forever. Big deal.

The author uses it to pop up a message when his network-connection script runs. Seems he just realised that there's a world of desktop users out there too. Taking care to make your programs (shell scripts or otherwise) user-friendly, interactive and informative isn't newsworthy. Indeed, it should be compulsory. Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Morph) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?346267 http://osnews.com/thread?346267 I'm not sure you can convert the power of the shell to a GUI. A major selling point of the shell is piping commands together and I just cannot see how this'll be possible on the GUI. Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (flanque) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?346271 http://osnews.com/thread?346271 "Whilst an increasing number of recent converts are avoiding it"

I often see glib statements about new Unix users avoiding the shell. What I have not seen is any basis for these statements. Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (massysett) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?346278 http://osnews.com/thread?346278 Yeah. What is needed is something like the Windows AutoHotKey that can intelligently script Qt and GTK applications. Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (mmebane) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?346279 http://osnews.com/thread?346279 From the article:
In my experience, users accustomed to a dialog with Yes/No buttons can find themselves stumped by a black window with a bunch of white text, the last line of which says something like Interface not found: proceed (Y/N)?.
I find myself stumped reading this. Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (righard) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?346290 http://osnews.com/thread?346290 For KDE users there is kdialog. It has everything zenity has minus calender but plus many other things: --geticon, --getopenurl, --menu, --combobox, --password, --checklist, --radiolist etc.
In combination with kfmclient (or kioclient for KDE4) this is really handy. I use it from python, too. e.g.: http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Get+YouTube+Video+(improved)?content=41456 Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (panzi) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?346408 http://osnews.com/thread?346408 zenity (or kdialog or xdialog etc.) are all well and good, but your shell script should check for $DISPLAY and only run zenity if it's set. If it isn't set, each GUI dialog prompt/display will need the equivalent text-only prompts/output.

I'm about to do something similar myself with a text-only program I've written (in C - nothing wrong with system()'ing zenity from a binary - it's not just for shell scripts) - I'll be calling zenity for input and output, but only if $DISPLAY is set and /usr/bin/zenity is available (otherwise the old text input/output code will be used as a fallback). Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (rklrkl) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?346471 http://osnews.com/thread?346471 there are also "dialog" program for text terminals, and "gdialog" which use zenity but has same parameters as dialog.
so u can do something like on top of your script
[ "$DISPLAY" ] && DIALOG="gdialog" || DIALOG="dialog" Sun, 01 Feb 2009 06:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (pawnhearts) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?346491 http://osnews.com/thread?346491 Yes, what you say is true. But the problem is that to allow the user to work as he/she is used to may require quite a bit of work if you do it in any other way than zenity or kdialog.

Like, for instance, having him pick a date.

You can write a whole script and just use zenity to put up the user interactions with minimal work, and its all going to be very intuitive and normal for them.

Example at

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/make-your-scripts-user-friendly...

What it means is, you can use shell scripts where otherwise you might be driven to a full blown gui language. Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (alcibiades) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?346493 http://osnews.com/thread?346493 Haven't actually done it, but it looks like the zenity commands to get the user input are just one line in the script. You can still pipe anything to anything in the rest of the script, and also can pipe that input. Sun, 01 Feb 2009 11:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (alcibiades) Comments