Yad: Create ad-hoc GTK GUIs from shell | Hacker News Reader

Yad: Create ad-hoc GTK GUIs from shell

github.com

61 pointsasicsp24 comments

Yad is fantastic! Write the core of your app in bash/curl/jq, then write a thin wrapper to invoke yad so your app is presentable to non-techie people.

Also see:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Zenity (also gtk, less features, GNOME project)

In KDE/Qt domain:

https://github.com/KDE/kdialog

https://github.com/luebking/qarma

There's also GTK-server: https://www.gtk-server.org

I've used zenity to do the same kind of thing. If you're writing a simple shell script & need some simplistic local GUI interaction, zenity is great; it's easy to create / read / modify the code.

Sounds like something Tcl/Tk would be an appropriate tool for.

Tk seems stagnated, no hidpi in wayland for example?

Yad has been around for a very long time. I was using it ~2010 to build system startup login dialogs for systems I was purposing as “thin clients”

I think this is super impressive and super far into the realm of "oh my god please don't actually use this for anything real".

> "oh my god please don't actually use this for anything real"

Dare do explain why? If all you need is a form to pop up and some way to save the data, this is probably the least steep learning curve for anyone who already has to work on a UNIX but is clueless about it.

A few reasons:

- Now you can't use these shell scripts purely on the shell

- Bash is a terrible language for writing complex programs. If you actually are at the point where you need a GUI your program is complex enough that you should use a scripting language. It's going to be more maintainable, probably shorter. I don't really buy that bash is more accessible to non-programmer ops people. If you're getting to the point where you're writing a GUI, you are programming, you're just programming in a bad/slow language.

But you don't have to use Bash, you can use whatever you want.

A long time ago when I was a student and elected at my university's board, I built an entire CMS system using zenity (an equivalent of Yad) because I wanted non-technical people (other elected students) to be able to update a static website easily. We only had static web space to publish the board's documents and our minutes of each of the boards reunion for other students. It even worked okay over ssh with -X (of course I created a clic-me launcher for the other they wouldn't open a terminal and ssh -X into the university's server). It was… kinda fun, in its own way.

Yad is great! It makes it easy to use a scripting language (bash, python, common lisp, etc.) and pretty quickly come up with a usable widgety thing.

A couple of things I've made using it:

- vpnd: an update notifier for Void Linux, using Bash [1]

- volemad: a now 'deprecated' interface for Mullvad's wireguard, using Common Lisp [2]

[1]: https://gitlab.com/emacsomancer/vpnd

[2]: https://gitlab.com/emacsomancer/volemad

Quick look at the examples: https://sanana.kiev.ua/index.php/yad ... Looks like too much code.

I think apple's Visual Format Language https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Us... seems a better approach.

VFL uses a constraint-packing model, which is excellent for UIs that may be resized (can we all say "mobile" ?).

It doesn't offer the same level of fine-grained control over the actual widgets, and tends to feel (in|less ) appropriate with fixed-sized windows.

Also, these are not really comparable examples. The Yad one shows the full interaction with the shell script; the VPL one shows merely how to construct the UI, but does not show any integration with the logic residing in a script.

This is nifty. Is there any similar tool that presents the UI as a web page, rather than a GTK gui?

GTK actually seems to be capable of this for many years, with its "Broadway" GDK backend:

GTK4 docs: https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/broadway.html

GTK3 docs: https://docs.gtk.org/gtk3/broadway.html

You can run broadway inside a container as well. Yad could make an interesting entrypoint for it

NodeJS, PHP, Python, Perl?

Write the WebUI in a separate HTML page, then start a server and listen for requests.

zenity also does this. It can be useful to gather user data for scripts you don't run from the terminal (say a hotkey)

This appears to allow you to build significantly more complex dialogs than zenity.

Zenity is very limited in what it can do though. You slam into the limits with some pretty simple requirements. Plus it spits out an annoying warning about parentless modal dialogs every time you use it.

That said I've used it quite a lot because it is installed by default. If you can't guarantee that anything has been installed on the system or that you have an Internet connection it is incredibly helpful to have a simple GUI system available to shell scripts by default.

yad is an (old) fork of zenity

This really needs a few examples with screenshots.

http://smokey01.com/yad/

https://sourceforge.net/p/yad-dialog/wiki/Examples/

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