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I've used wish (https://linux.die.net/man/1/wish) for this in the past and it works pretty well. It used to come installed on many Linux distros but probably does not anymore.

Zenity is also an option.

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Both are wonderful options for some use cases. I would also take one of thise approaches for the simple demo in the blog post.

But the system UI that is also linked in there is something that goes beyond what you can do with e.g. zenity.

This kind of puts (almost) all the power of a modern UI description language in reach of shell scripts.

And tksh (shell with tk builtins), which made (makes, if you take the trouble to install it now) it trivial to add a simple GUI to an existing shell script.

Do you happen to know where there's a copy of the source? The stuff on the tcl wiki all seems to be dead and that sounds fascinating to take apart to learn how it works.

https://github.com/att/ast

There's not really much to it; it's just an example of extending ksh with more builtins, which is simple by design. (I really miss what this did for Sun's dbx debugger — instead of being inside some tool with yet another idiosyncratic command language, your shell just grew commands for interacting with the process being debugged.)

Aha, I shall have a dig through https://github.com/att/ast/tree/master/src/lib/libtksh then.

Thank you kindly.

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