Make a Linux "GUI" in the command line

Question

How to make a Linux program in the Command Line Interface who display a nice user interface?

For example when I use "wget" to download a file from internet, I can see the download advancement in the Command Line Interface. How can I do that?

Answer 1

ncurses is a popular option, there are APIs for lots of programming languages.

Answer 2

Take a look at curses. It is a library for text based UI.

Answer 3

You can get a basic interface by using \r to go to the beginning of the current line.

Slightly more advanced is ncurses.

The next step up is Newt.

Answer 4

If you want to do a GUI for Bash scripts or to wrap around other command line utilities, you can use dialog (man page).

Here two great dialog tutorial to get you started :

• Dialog: An Introductory Tutorial
• Improve Bash Shell Scripts Using Dialog.

Answer 5

If you only need a progress bar, this can be done directly with a simple print (that prints the bar), followed by the carriage return character (ANSI character #13), which puts you back at the beginning of the line. The line can then be later updated by printing over it.

For more complicated needs, ncurses is indeed the standard way to go.

Answer 6

I wouldn't call wget's progress report as a 'nice gui', but anyway, the classic library for building graphical interfaces without X Windows is Linux and UNIX systems is ncurses.

Recently a C# version of ncurses has been started, check out details here

Answer 7

One should mention FTXUI. Functional Terminal (X) User interface: A simple C++ library for terminal-based user interfaces!

• Cross-Platform
• Support for UTF8 and fullwidth chars (→ 测试)
• No dependencies
• etc

Answer 8

If you're using Mono, you could use MonoCurses

Answer 9

Try curses, it is a well documented API for text based UI.Also, there is so much open source projects that are using curses for you see and learn

Answer 10

wget does not really have a GUI, all I see is stuff that you can already achieve using stdout and echos (e.g. printf() or std::cout)

Anyways, for simple dialog boxes of the MessageBox kind, but not limited to that, also have a look at dialog

• http://linux.die.net/man/1/dialog
• http://hightek.org/dialog/

Answer 11

You can just use ANSI escape codes. A simple example in bash

echo -e "\033[H\033[2J  \033[20;20H  \033[4mThis is a underlined line.\033[0m"