Dialog is a utility to create nice user interfaces to shell
scripts, or other scripting languages, such as perl. It is
non-graphical (it uses curses) so it can be run in the console or
an xterm. There are also graphical Xwindows versions mentioned
below.
This document describes the status of all dialog branches I was
able to find.
Dialog has been around for at least 7 or 8 years and is fairly
widely used. Slackware Linux was using it for it's installation
scripts in the early days of it's distribution and still does to
this day (at least as of Slackware 7.0). Strangely enough, I have
never seen a web site for dialog with console screen shots before
I put up this page (however, there are web sites for the two
recent Xwindows branches). This is one of the reasons I decided
to put up this page. My goal is also to help coordinate and
encourage the current developers/contributers to strive for as
much compatibility as possible between dialog and Xdialog.
Dialog was originally written by Savio Lam but apparently he quit
maintaining it long ago. This has caused it to branch into
various directions over the years by programmers who wanted
different features and/or needed different bugs fixed. These
various patched versions have just been floating around on ftp
sites. It has been confusing and time consuming to locate them
and figure out which one to use. I finally posted the one I fixed
some bugs in, dialog-0.62, on freshmeat (after various emails I
sent to obsolete addresses of the author and contributers bounced)
before finding out about dialog-0.9a-20010115.
dialog-0.7
http://www.hightek.org/dialog/
ftp://hightek.org/pub/vstemen/dialog-0.7.tar.gz
This is dialog-0.61a with a couple of bugs fixed by me plus some
patches sent to me by others. To the best of my knowledge 0.61a
was the last version ever released of the original dialog package
(actually 0.7 now). It works pretty well but has none of the
newer features that have been added to the dialog-0.9a+
branches. This branch will not likely evolve any further. I may
apply bug fixes if people send me patches but most problems have
already been fixed in dialog-0.9a+.
If you have any problems with the appearance or functionality of
older scripts using the newer 0.9a+ versions, then you may want to
use this version until the scripts are updated or the problem is
fixed in the newer one.
cdialog-0.9a
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/shell
To the best of my knowledge, the cdialog branches are no longer
maintained.
Cdialog supposedly has new features over the original dialog but
they have never been documented and primarily only the original
features seem to work. Neither the gauge or wheel sample worked.
The Entered-date in the LSM is Jan 15, 1996 and I found no new
dates in the README and no change log.
dialog-0.9a+
ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/dialog/
This is the one I would consider to be the official version of
dialog. It is the most stable, complete, and maintained dialog
package for use in the console. It is based on cdialog-0.9a but
all the demonstration samples actually work. This one has some
nice new features and even has an up to date man page. Prior to
version 0.9a-20010429 it did not work well with my existing
scripts because it striped the extra spaces out of the text in my
dialog messages which messed up the appearance of my existing
scripts that align information for appearance and readability.
This is fixed in dialog-0.9a-20010429, It includes patches by me
and Thomas Dickey.
Dialog-0.9a+ is being actively maintained and enhanced by
Thomas Dickey and is hosted on the Debian Linux site, so patches,
etc. should probably be submitted to them through the debian bug
reporting system, or to Thomas Dickey
<dickey@herndon4.his.com>.
Xdialog-1.5.2 +
http://www.chez.com/godefroy/ Wdialog-0.5.1
http://wdialog.latinpenguin.com/
Both of these are Xwindows graphical replacements to dialog. They
both work pretty well but Xdialog seems to have the most features
and be the most stable.
Xdialog obeyed the menu height parameter of my menu box where
Wdialog did not. My script set the menu height to 5. Wdialog
displayed it about 3 1/2.
The author of Wdialog, Luis E Limon, says he wants to create one
package that standardizes between xdialog and cdialog. It comes
with two programs, wdialog (for the console) and wxdialog (for
X).
The tailbox sample in both Xdialog and wxdialog would not let me cancel
or delete the window through the window manager until it got to the
bottom of the file it was tailing. This is inconvenient on a long log
file. This is now fixed as of
Xdialog-1.5.3. Xdialog-1.5.3
also now has a dialog-compatible --item-help
option.
The gauge sample worked in Xdialog.
With wxdialog, it gave a Segmentation fault near
the end and printed a warning to the screen:
Gtk-WARNING **: invalid cast from (NULL) pointer to `GtkProgress'
...
Update: 7/4/2001
Xdialog, as of version 2.0.0, now works quite nicely as a drop in
replacement for dialog to give your dialog scripts a GUI interface
under Xwindows. All you have to do is set a couple of environment
variabls, $XDIALOG_HIGH_DIALOG_COMPAT and $XDIALOG_FORCE_AUTOSIZE.
lxdialog
This is a much-reduced variation of dialog which is used in Linux
kernel configuration. It is distributed as part of the Linux
kernel sources package
dldialog
https://sourceforge.net/projects/dldialog/
This is a brand new dialog package that has apparently only
recently appeared. It is the first potential competitor to dialog
I have ever seen that is not based on dialog. It uses a library
called tvision for console mode. Tvision is a product of Borland
International that was originally developed to run on MS-DOS
systems but has been ported to Linux and released under a BSD
style copyright. The Xwindows side of dldialog required the older
qt-1.30 and would not configure with my qt-2.2.2 library, so I
have not evaluated it.
I fully agree with the goal of the author of the Wdialog package,
Luis Limon, to create 100% compatibility in X and the console
mode. This would stop redundant development for scripts to work
in both environments. In fact, that is one of the primary reasons
I put up this web site.
However, although I wish Luis Limon the best on his Wdialog
project, currently I find Xdialog and dialog to be the most
complete and closest to achieving this goal.
Since I put up this website, Thierry Godefroy, the author of
Xdialog, has modified Xdialog to work quite well as a compatible
dialog drop in replacement.