(on Wikipedia)
https://invisible-island.net/dialog/

A program to present a commandline dialog, letting a scripter get user input.

Capable enough for everyday scripts. Capable enough that to get a "GUI" dialog, I would rather spawn a terminal and use dialog.

• cat
• The shell builtin read.
• A GUI option would be Xdialog.

• I think it's hilarious there are so many nice screenshots of a text program.

• 2018-05-15 - 1.2-20140911 on Devuan-1.0.0-jessie-i386-DVD
• 2016-03-28 - (version not recorded) on Slackware 14.1
• 2016-03-26 - 1.2-20130928 on Lubuntu 14.04.4 LTS
• 2009-03-25 - 0.9b-20040421 on (distribution not recorded)

• Dialog has come with probably every Linux distribution I've ever used.

Examples ∞

• menu (variable)

• menu (file)

For a GUI popup, you don't need xdialog, zenity or the like. Use your GUI terminal, with some sort of --command and pass your dialog command to it. Examples:

• gui-yesno-dialog.sh

• For complex code, you can probably add it into some external file, and then do something like the following (example is urxvt):

\urxvt  -e script.sh

Resources ∞

• https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2460
• https://hightek.org/projects/dialog/ ^[ 1 ] was http://hightek.org/dialog/

• mgo_input

Alternatives ∞

• /tag/dialog-software

  • /tag/dialog-software+commandline-software
  • /tag/dialog-software+gui-software
• YAD - a fork of Zenity with some dependencies removed.
• Wenity

• dldialog

  • Offers the capability to draw a variety of widgets. It includes a definition language similar to Tcl/Tk. It can display dialogs the tvision/ncurses interface or using graphical windows with the QT/X11 interface.
  • GUI and console.
  • Last updated Mar 14 2001.
• ratmen is a keyboard-based menu
• ratmenu may be a good choice for a general menu.

• LXDE's lxlauncher

"Whiptail" ∞

Damn Small Linux has "Whiptail"

I can't find a homepage for it: forum thread

This is basically a smaller version of Dialog with fewer features.

It provides a way to create a keyboard-driven interface within shell scripts that can be used either in the Linux console or an X terminal. An example of its use in Damn Small Linux is it's xsetup.sh

Most of the DSL-specific GUI tools were created by Robert using murgaLua. This is essentially a version of Lua which includes FLTK widgets and a few other features. With murgaLua you can create "normal" text-based Lua scripts, as well as X-based FLTK interfaces that are controlled by Lua.

The official murgaLua release includes Fluid, which is a graphical tool used to create FLTK interfaces, and a lua script that converts the C++ output of Fluid into a Lua script that can be interpreted by murgaLua.