System: Ubuntu 14. Downloaded April 2015

People have posted about using pango in a zenity command. Something like this should work:

zenity --info --text '<span color="green"></span>'"Hi mom"

but no color change occurs in the zenity box.

Do I need another package to make it work?

I think you need to check your quotes. Maybe try putting quotes around the entire 'text' argument.
This works for me but I'm using zenity version 2.32.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for your reply. I tried it exactly as you wrote but no luck. I have a minimal system so only openbox and X. That's what made me think I might need another package.

The manner of writing it with single quotes around the whole span section was copied from someone in a posting somewhere who was telling another poster how to do it.

No error from zenity. No green either.

You could try using an older version of zenity. You would probably need to compile a gtk2 version of zenity (like 2.32) against gtk2 and go from there. The new versions are built for GTK3 and of course inherit everything that comes along with that. Many features in GTK3 are getting removed.

Here you can get an idea of the build dependencies. You should be able to use all of the build dependencies from your current distro.

Also note that I moved the </span> to after Hi mom. The color needs to "span" the text or else the instruction to change color ends before your text gets parsed.

The span at the end fixed the --info option and, in fact, allowed my real zenity command (zenity --list --radiolist) to also output what is in --text in large green font. However, the --column does not allow a span nor does the data lines.

I'm not too sure that's going to work. First of all, I presume you have something like According to this thread it only looks like a handful of options support markup with (radio)lists' entries not being among them.

There is a fork of zenity called yad that supposedly has some improvements. Unfortunately I haven't had the time to look into it yet.

I started using yad and abandoned zenity. It works far far better and I would encourage abandoning zenity for new projects. However, like zenity, it has insufficient examples and so it is difficult to figure out how to accomplish tasks. It seems that most of the examples are repeats of the same thing.

Thanks for all replies.