Xdialog ported to GTK+ 3

Xdialog is a popular program to create a simple GUI for shell scripts. It is easy to use and implements the most commonly used GUI elements (e.g. input boxes, message boxes, etc). It was one of the earliest program of its kind.

Sure, there are tons of similar program like this nowadays, some with even more powerful features - kdialog, zenity, yad, and I'm sure there are a lot more ... but Xdialog has two things going for it.

1. It's available almost anywhere.
2. It's command line interface (the parameters you pass to it, to get the GUI you want), is stable and unchanged in the last 20 years.

Any program you write with Xdialog would most probably work, while the same thing can't be easily said for the others.

There is only one problem. Xdialog is old, and for the longest time, has always been available only with those with GTK+ 2. GTK+2 has been end-of-life for about a decade now, although it is still popular.

GTK+ 2 replacement is GTK+ 3, so it's a reasonable migration path (as opposed to Qt for example, which requires a total re-write).

So far, I have not found a port of Xdialog to GTK+ 3, so I decided to start my own. The motivation is simple: so that in the future when we move to GTK+ 2-less future (only pure GTK+ 3), existing shell scripts that use Xdialog still works (we have a ton of those).

The result is here: http://chiselapp.com/user/jamesbond/repository/xdialog/index

The code in the repository compiles with both GTK+ 2 and GTK+ 3 (the original Xdialog compiles with GTK+ 1 and GTK+ 2). Login as anonymous in order to download the tarball. The port retains almost all of the features of the original Xdialog (except "unavailable" status are not available for radiolist/checklist/buidlist).




PS: While in the process of porting it, I found that somebody already did that here: https://github.com/wdlkmpx/Xdialog. I ended up using borrowing some of the codes from there to speed up the porting process, although the final code that goes into my repository is different wdlkmpx's. Another thing which is different is that I tried to retain all the existing functionalities, while wdlkmpx's port has dropped some of the lesser used features (which he documented in the his version of the Xdialog's manual).



Posted on 2 Jan 2022, 18:51 - Categories: Linux General
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