How to make a GUI for bash scripts?
User InterfaceBashGtkTclTkUser Interface Problem Overview
I want to make some graphical dialogs for my script but don't know how. I hear something about GTK-Server or something like that. If someone knows how to link Bash with tcl/tk I also be satisfied.
Please do not post something like "change to C++" because my project must be a script in Bash; there are no other options.
Any ideas?
EDIT:
Thanks for answers but I don't want "graphics" as in colors in the console, but graphical windows which I can move, minimize etc.
I will test xmessage
, but I don't think that will be what I am searching for.
EDIT 2: I don't want make a simple dialog like yes/no, but some interface like progress bars and buttons, something like a game.
User Interface Solutions
Solution 1 - User Interface
Before actually using GUI dialogues, consider using console prompts. Quite often you can get away with simple "y/n?" prompts, which in bash you achieve via the read
command..
read -p "Do something? ";
if [ $REPLY == "y" ]; then
echo yay;
fi
If console prompt's just won't cut it, Zenity is really easy to use, for example:
zenity --error --text="Testing..."
zenity --question --text="Continue?"
This only works on Linux/Gnome (or rather, it'll only be installed by default on such systems). The read
method will work on pretty much any platform (including headless machines, or via SSH)
If you need anything more complex than what read or Zenity provides, "change to C++" is really the best method (although I'd recommend Python/Ruby over C++ for such shell-script-replacement tasks)
> I want to do simple interface for some strange game, the progress bar for health or something is the example for what I want. Variable "HEALTH" is 34, so make progress bar filled in 34/100
As a command-line script, it'd use Python:
$ export HEALTH=34
$ python -c "import os; print '*' * int(os.environ.get('HEALTH', 0))"
**********************************
Or to normalise the values between 1 and 78 (so you don't get line-wrapping on a standard terminal size):
$ python -c "import os; print '*' * int((int(os.environ.get('HEALTH', 0)) / 100.0) * 78)"
Zenity also has a Progress Dialog,
#!/bin/sh
(
echo "10" ; sleep 1
echo "# Updating mail logs" ; sleep 1
echo "20" ; sleep 1
echo "# Resetting cron jobs" ; sleep 1
echo "50" ; sleep 1
echo "This line will just be ignored" ; sleep 1
echo "75" ; sleep 1
echo "# Rebooting system" ; sleep 1
echo "100" ; sleep 1
) |
zenity --progress \
--title="Update System Logs" \
--text="Scanning mail logs..." \
--percentage=0
if [ "$?" = -1 ] ; then
zenity --error \
--text="Update canceled."
fi
As I said before, if Zenity cannot do what you need, look into writing your game-thing as a "proper" script in Python/Ruby/Perl/C++/etc as it sounds like you're pushing the bounds of what a shell-script can do..
Solution 2 - User Interface
If you want to write a graphical UI in bash, zenity is the way to go. This is what you can do with it:
Application Options:
--calendar Display calendar dialog
--entry Display text entry dialog
--error Display error dialog
--info Display info dialog
--file-selection Display file selection dialog
--list Display list dialog
--notification Display notification
--progress Display progress indication dialog
--question Display question dialog
--warning Display warning dialog
--scale Display scale dialog
--text-info Display text information dialog
Combining these widgets you can create pretty usable GUIs. Of course, it's not as flexible as a toolkit integrated into a programming language, but in some cases it's really useful.
Solution 3 - User Interface
there is a command called dialog
which uses the ncurses library. "Dialog is a program that will let you to present a variety of questions or display messages using dialog boxes from a shell script. These types of dialog boxes are implemented (though not all are necessarily compiled into dialog)"
Solution 4 - User Interface
Well, if you can use Tcl/Tk in your environment, you probably should write a TCL script and use that. You might also look at wish.
Solution 5 - User Interface
You could use dialog that is ncurses based or whiptail that is slang based.
I think both have GTK or Tcl/Tk bindings.
Solution 6 - User Interface
You can gtk-server for this. Gtk-server is a program that runs in background and provides text-based interface to allow other programs (including bash scripts) to control it. It has examples for Bash (http://www.gtk-server.org/demo-ipc.bash.txt, http://www.gtk-server.org/demo-fifo.bash.txt)
Solution 7 - User Interface
Please, take a look at my library: http://sites.google.com/site/easybashgui
It is intended to handle, with the same commands set, indifferently all four big tools "kdialog", "Xdialog", "cdialog" and "zenity", depending if X is running or not, if D.E. is KDE or Gnome or other. There are 15 different functions ( among them there are two called "progress" and "adjust" )...
Bye :-)
Solution 8 - User Interface
If you have Qt/KDE installed, you can use kdialog, which pops up a Qt dialog window. You can easily specify to display a Yes/No dialog, OK/Cancel, simple text input, password input etc. You then have access to the return values from these dialogs at the shell.