gtDialog

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Introduction

gtDialog is a cross-platform application for creating interactive dialogs from either the command line or from an application. It is written completely in C and can display graphical dialogs using GTK or display terminal-based dialogs using a curses implementation like ncurses. gtDialog is inspired by cocoaDialog and shares many of its dialog types and arguments. You can use gtDialog to easily create interactive dialogs for yes/no confirmations, textual input, file selections, selection lists and more.

Features

• Graphical (GTK) or terminal-based (curses) dialogs.
• 17 different dialog types including:
  • Messageboxes
  • Inputboxes
  • File selections
  • Textbox
  • Progressbar
  • Dropdown lists
  • Filtered list
  • Option list
  • Color selector (GTK only)
  • Font selector (GTK only)
• No knowledge of GTK or curses is required to use either the command line program or the C library.
• Any programming language with shell access can utilize the command line program.

Requirements

gtDialog requires only GTK version 2.16 or later or a curses implementation (like ncurses or pdcurses) and CDK.

Download

gtDialog releases can be found here.

Compile

gtDialog can be built as a standalone command line application, or compiled as a C library into an existing application.

Requirements:

• A C99-compliant compiler like GCC or Clang. (e.g. provided by the build-essential package on Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu.)
• GNU Make
• GTK development libraries (e.g. libgtk2.0-dev).
• Curses and CDK development libraries (e.g. libncurses5-dev and libcdk5-dev).

The standalone command line application currently only builds on Linux and BSD, though it can be cross-compiled for Windows and macOS (which is beyond the scope of this document). The following table provides a list of make rules for building gtDialog on Linux and BSD. (On BSD, substitute make with gmake.)

If you want to install gtDialog into a non-standard location, you can specify that location using the DESTDIR variable. For example:

make install DESTDIR=/prefix/to/install/to

In order to compile the C library into your existing application, add gtdialog.h and gtdialog.c to your project’s sources and pass either the -DGTK or -DCURSES flag to the compiler, followed by -DLIBRARY and optionally -DNOHELP.

Usage

The standalone command line application is executed as follows:

gtdialog type arguments

where type specifies which dialog to use, and arguments is a set of arguments for that dialog type. For example:

gtdialog yesno-msgbox --title Confirm --text "Quit?" --icon dialog-question

Running gtdialog help shows a list of dialog types along with a brief description for each, and running gtdialog help type shows all available arguments for that dialog type.

gtDialog comes with a reference guide in its docs/ directory that covers all dialog types and their arguments.

In order to use gtDialog as a C library, add #include "gtdialog.h" to the source file you want to invoke gtDialog from, and then call gtdialog() with a GTDialogType type, followed by an int argc and a char *argv[] of dialog arguments, just like those that would be given to the command line application. You can use the helper function gtdialog_type() to get a GTDialogType from a string. You are responsible for calling free() on the string returned by gtdialog(). For example:

#include "gtdialog.h"
...
void goto_line() {
  const char *argv[] = {
    "--title", "Goto Line", "--informative-text", "Line:", "--text", "1"
  };
  char *line_num = gtdialog(GTDIALOG_INPUTBOX, 6, argv));
  ...
  free(line_num);
}

Contribute

gtDialog is open source. Feel free to report bugs and submit patches.

© 2009-2020 Mitchell