Hi there.

I have been using Linux for around a year now, and think I have gotten to grips with shell scripting, mainly bash and csh. Now that I have the hang of these, I wanted to create some reasonably simple gui's to allow more simple modification of variables etc and running of the scripts.
Another example of what I would like to do is create a simple GUI for some of the games that I run for the command line,
i.e. PROGRAM [options] GAME LOCATION
Through this I'd just like to be able to run the program and make it easier to turn on/off options to enhance the running.

My main question is what is the best way to go about creating these GUI's?
What language should I use for them, and should I attempt to learn and write the code from scratch, or would I find it easier to simply find a program to write the code for me depending what things I want in. (Hard to explain but the closest thing I can think is a program that does for a GUI what dreamweaver/frontpage does for HTML code.)

I understand that some of this is maybe personal preference but any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance!

If you want a console "gui", I'd look at using ncurses.

And if you want pretty, look at qt4 designer.

...And if you want all of that while retaining slim and portable, look into TK/TCL.


The gui functions can be called from within PERL scripts. While shell scripts SHOULD also be able to take advantage of TK: I have not seen that done.

Like Perl, tk ports EVERYWHERE. You can even script within it (it is its own language) so that the dependencies remain few and manageable.

GUIs can be written in various languages (including but not limited to c, c++, python, it is just a matter of having the right library and understanding the syntax of the API (function calls, mostly), depends on what you need

i would recommend coding from scratch whenever possible as WYSIWIG editors like dreamweaver/frontpage have a tendency to add extra unnecessary code that will simply add bloat to the finished product

even shell scripts have the ability to attach a simple gui
example being winetricks

not exactly gui but zenity mite get close to what you want.