gtDialog

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.)

Command	Description
make	Builds gtDialog with GTK
make DEBUG=1	Optionally builds gtDialog with debug symbols
make install	Optionally installs gtDialog (to /usr/local by default)
make curses	Builds gtDialog with curses and cdk
make curses install	Optionally installs the curses version of gtDialog
make clean	Deletes all compiled files, leaving only source files

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.