Zenity
Zenity is an open source command line utility for Linux that allows creating simple graphical user interfaces from shell scripts or command line. It is useful for writing scripts that need to display messages, show progress bars, display dialogs to collect user input, and more.
gui
dialogs
notifications
progress-bars
Zenity: Open Source CLI Utility
An open source command line utility for Linux creating simple graphical user interfaces from shell scripts or command line, useful for displaying messages, showing progress bars and collecting user input.
What is Zenity?
Zenity is an open source command line utility for Linux that provides an easy way to create graphical user interfaces for scripts or command line programs. It allows displaying different kinds of dialog boxes, messages, data entry forms, progress bars, and more from the terminal or shell scripts without requiring any graphical programming.
Some of the common uses of Zenity include:
- Displaying notification messages or informational dialogs
- Asking users questions and getting input
- Creating confirmation dialogs
- Selecting files or directories
- Displaying progress bars for long-running tasks
- Displaying lists for selecting items
As a lightweight utility that leverages GTK+ underneath, Zenity provides an simple way to add basic GUI elements to automate tasks. It comes pre-installed on many Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. The syntax is straightforward, allowing to call zenity from the command line or shell scripts by passing different options. Being open source, it is customizable as well.
Overall, Zenity is a useful tool for Linux power users, developers and sysadmins to easily add visual elements and interactivity to terminal commands and shell scripts.
Zenity Features
Features
- Display message boxes
- Display progress bars
- Display file selection dialogs
- Display calendar selection dialogs
- Display text entry dialogs
- Display list selection dialogs
- Display check box dialogs
- Display radio button dialogs
Pricing
- Open Source
Pros
Lightweight and fast
Easy to use from shell scripts
Good for simple GUIs
Bundled with many Linux distros
Cons
Limited functionality compared to full GUI toolkits
Text-only, no rich graphical interfaces
Not as feature-rich as other tools like Yad
Official Links
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