pythondialog is a Python wrapper for the UNIX dialog utility originally written by Savio Lam and later rewritten by Thomas E. Dickey. Its purpose is to provide an easy to use, pythonic and as complete as possible interface to dialog from Python code.
.. _dialog: https://invisible-island.net/dialog/dialog.html
pythondialog is free software, licensed under the GNU LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License). Its home page is located at:
https://pythondialog.sourceforge.io/
and contains a short example, screenshots, a summary of the recent changes, links to the documentation, the Git repository, the
mailing list, the issue tracker_, etc.
.. _short example: https://pythondialog.sourceforge.io/#example .. _screenshots: https://pythondialog.sourceforge.io/gallery.html .. _summary of the recent changes: https://pythondialog.sourceforge.io/news.html .. _documentation: https://pythondialog.sourceforge.io/doc/ .. _Git repository: https://sourceforge.net/p/pythondialog/code/ .. _mailing list: https://sourceforge.net/p/pythondialog/mailman/ .. _issue tracker: https://sourceforge.net/p/pythondialog/_list/tickets
If you want to get a quick idea of what this module allows one to do,
you can download a release tarball and run demo.py::
PYTHONPATH=. python3 examples/demo.py
As you might infer from the name, dialog is a high-level program that
generates dialog boxes. So is pythondialog. They allow you to build nice
interfaces quickly and easily, but you don't have full control over the
widgets, nor can you create new widgets without modifying dialog itself.
If you need to do low-level stuff, you should have a look at ncurses
(cf. the curses module in the Python standard library), blessings
or slang instead. For sophisticated text-mode interfaces, the Urwid Python library_ looks rather interesting, too.
.. _ncurses: https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.html .. _blessings: https://github.com/erikrose/blessings .. _Urwid Python library: http://excess.org/urwid/
As of version 2.12, pythondialog requires Python 3.0 or later in the 3.x series. pythondialog 3.5.3 has been tested with Python 3.9.
dialog version 1.3-20201126-1 (the version shipped in Debian stable
and unstable in November 2021) is broken <https://bugs.debian.org/990043>; don't waste your time with that
version. dialog_ 1.3-20210621 works fine.
Versions of pythondialog up to and including 3.5.1 had a backport to
Python 2, however this outdated Python dialect isn't supported
anymore. You may find pointers to the old packages with Python 2
support on the pythondialog home page_.
.. _pythondialog home page: https://pythondialog.sourceforge.io/
Apart from that, pythondialog requires the dialog_ program (or a drop-in replacement for dialog). You can download dialog from:
https://invisible-island.net/dialog/dialog.html
Note that some features of pythondialog may require recent versions of dialog.
If you have a working pip <https://pypi.org/project/pip/>_ setup,
you should be able to install pythondialog with::
pip install pythondialog
When doing so, make sure that your pip executable runs with the
Python 3 installation you want to install pythondialog for.
For more detailed instructions, you can read the INSTALL file from a
release tarball. You may also want to consult the pip documentation <https://pip.pypa.io/>_.
The pythondialog Manual ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The pythondialog Manual is written in reStructuredText format for the
Sphinx documentation generator. The HTML documentation for the latest
version of pythondialog as rendered by Sphinx should be available at:
https://pythondialog.sourceforge.io/doc/
.. _pythondialog Manual: https://pythondialog.sourceforge.io/doc/ .. _reStructuredText: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html .. _Sphinx: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/ .. _LaTeX: https://www.latex-project.org/ .. _Make: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/
The sources for the pythondialog Manual are located in the doc
top-level directory of the pythondialog distribution, but the
documentation build process pulls many parts from dialog.py (mainly
docstrings).
To generate the documentation yourself from dialog.py and the
sources in the doc directory, first make sure you have Sphinx and
Make installed. Then, you can go to the doc directory and type,
for instance::
make html
You will then find the output in the _build/html subdirectory of
doc. Sphinx can build the documentation in many other formats.
For instance, if you have LaTeX installed, you can generate the
pythondialog Manual in PDF format using::
make latexpdf
You can run make from the doc directory to see a list of the
available formats. Run make clean to clean up after the
documentation build process.
For those who have installed Sphinx but not Make, it is still
possible to build the documentation with a command such as::
sphinx-build -b html . _build/html
run from the doc directory. Please refer to sphinx-build_ for more
details.
.. _sphinx-build: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/man/sphinx-build.html
Reading the docstrings from an interactive Python interpreter ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
If you have already installed pythondialog, you may consult its docstrings in an interactive Python interpreter this way::
import dialog; help(dialog)
but only parts of the documentation are available using this method, and
the result is much less convenient to use than the pythondialog Manual as generated by Sphinx.
There are a few places in dialog.py that send a
DeprecationWarning to warn developers about obsolete features.
However, because of:
you have to do two things in order to see them:
For instance, to see the warnings produced when running the demo, you can do::
PYTHONPATH=. python3 -Wd examples/demo.py 2>/path/to/file
and examine /path/to/file. This can also help you to find files that
are still open when your program exits.
Note:
If your program is terminated by an unhandled exception while stderr is redirected as in the preceding command, you won't see the traceback until you examine the file stderr was redirected to. This can be disturbing, as your program may exit with no apparent reason in such conditions.
For more explanations and other methods to enable deprecation warnings, please refer to:
https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/2.7.html
If you have a problem with a pythondialog call, you should read its
documentation and the dialog(1) manual page. If this is not enough, you
can enable logging of shell command-line equivalents of all dialog calls
made by your program with a simple call to Dialog.setup_debug(),
first available in pythondialog 2.12 (the expand_file_opt parameter
may be useful in versions 3.3 and later). An example of this can be
found in demo.py from the examples directory.
As of version 2.12, you can also enable this debugging facility for
demo.py by calling it with the --debug flag (possibly combined
with --debug-expand-file-opt in pythondialog 3.3 and later, cf.
demo.py --help).
As far as I can tell, Xdialog has not been ported to GTK+ version
2 or later. It is not in Debian stable nor unstable (November 30, 2019).
It is not installed on my system (because of the GTK+ 1.2 dependency),
and according to the Xdialog-specific patches I received from Peter
Åstrand in 2004, was not a drop-in replacement for dialog (in
particular, Xdialog seemed to want to talk to the caller through stdout
instead of stderr, grrrrr!).
.. _Xdialog: http://xdialog.free.fr/ .. _GTK+: https://www.gtk.org/ .. _Debian: https://www.debian.org/
All this to say that, even though I didn't remove the options to use
another backend than dialog, nor did I remove the handful of little,
non-invasive modifications that help pythondialog work better with
Xdialog_, I don't really support the latter. I test everything with
dialog, and nothing with Xdialog.
That being said, here is the old text of this section (from 2004), in case you are still interested:
Starting with 2.06, there is an "Xdialog" compatibility mode that you can use if you want pythondialog to run the graphical Xdialog program (which should be found under http://xdialog.free.fr/) instead of dialog (text-mode, based on the ncurses library).
The primary supported platform is still dialog, but as long as only small modifications are enough to make pythondialog work with Xdialog, I am willing to support Xdialog if people are interested in it (which turned out to be the case for Xdialog).
The demo.py from pythondialog 2.06 has been tested with Xdialog 2.0.6 and found to work well (barring Xdialog's annoying behaviour with the file selection dialog box).
Well, pythondialog seems not to work very well with whiptail. The reason is that whiptail is not compatible with dialog anymore. Although you can tell pythondialog the program you want it to invoke, only programs that are mostly dialog-compatible are supported.
pythondialog was originally written by Robb Shecter. Sultanbek Tezadov
added some features to it (mainly the first gauge implementation, I
guess). Florent Rougon rewrote most parts of the program to make it more
robust and flexible so that it can give access to most features of the
dialog program. Peter Åstrand took over maintainership between 2004 and
2009, with particular care for the Xdialog_ support. Florent Rougon
took over maintainership again starting from 2009...
..