dialog ☆

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Description:
Display user-friendly message boxes from shell scripts

Type: Formula | Latest Version: 1.3-20251001@0 | Tracked Since: Dec 17, 2025

Links: Homepage | formulae.brew.sh

Category: Developer tools

Tags: shell ncurses tui scripting cli

Install: brew install dialog

About:
Dialog is a utility that allows you to display user-friendly message boxes, menus, and input forms directly from shell scripts. It acts as a wrapper around the ncurses library, providing a clean and simple API for creating text-based user interfaces. This makes it an essential tool for improving the interactivity of installation scripts and system administration tasks.

Key Features:

Simple API for creating dialog boxes (yes/no, input, menus)
Lightweight and scriptable, designed for shell integration
Supports various dialog types including file selection and progress bars
Uses the ncurses library for a consistent terminal UI experience

Use Cases:

Creating interactive prompts in shell-based installation scripts
Building simple text-based menu systems for system administration
Gathering user input for configuration scripts without a full GUI

Alternatives:

whiptail – Part of newt library; similar functionality but different widget set and library dependency
zenity – Creates graphical (GTK) dialog boxes, requires a graphical environment

Version History

Detected	Version	Rev	Change	Commit
Jan 17, 2025 2:16am		0	VERSION_BUMP	8143456c