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I've been doing a lot of installs lately, and when possible I usually opt for the text install from the Live CD's GRUB menu. Most installers looks like this:

enter image description here

I always thought these GUIs (if you can call them as such) were really awesome and lightweight. Seeing as a lot of applications/distros use them, it must be a shared library or something right? Is there a way I can make stuff like this?

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It should be noted that most of the sysinstallers for linux & bsd have horrible user interface presentation using curses regarding the OK and Cancel buttons: it's rarely clear when the user has highlighted them. When implementing with curses it's best not to use those installers as a design example; go back to review those old DOS programs instead, like Lotus 123, for how good ANSI graphics GUIs should work in terms of UI. It's something like: [Ok] is lightly colored but not highlighted, until selected by the user. – Jonathan Cline IEEE Sep 1 '11 at 23:31

3 Answers

up vote 15 down vote accepted

You are looking for ncurses.

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Looks like you hit the money! Thanks – MaxMackie Aug 30 '11 at 18:23
Reading back I ask myself what exactly "hitting the money means"... I guess I was just excited. – MaxMackie Aug 30 '11 at 18:43
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@MaxMackie: Now that follow-up question would be better suited for english.stackexchange.com ;) – Piskvor Aug 30 '11 at 19:04
up vote 10 down vote

I don't know about Arch and Debian, but oftentimes those GUIs are made with dialog(1), which takes a bunch of command-line arguments and then renders a dialog with ncurses. For examples, the Linux kernel menuconfig looks like this:

Screenshot of menuconfig

An example dialog usage is:

$ dialog --title "Hello" --infobox "Hello there Unix and Linux Stack Exchange" 20 100

Which results in:

Screenshot of dialog(1)

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The image links don't seem to be working – MaxMackie Aug 30 '11 at 18:59
@Max Ah; I'm waiting for DNS changes to propagate. I moved them to imgur instead – Michael Mrozek♦ Aug 30 '11 at 19:11
This is pure awesome, so dialog uses ncurses to draw to the terminal? Couldn't be easier than that. Thanks – MaxMackie Aug 31 '11 at 2:10
up vote 6 down vote

At a higher level, the ones that look exactly like that generally use something like newt/whiptail or dialog. That particular one looks like it's newt/whiptail, since dialog tends to draw a frame around controls like that listbox. For another example, the linux kernel config uses a cut-down custom version of dialog (without extra features it doesn't use, and I would imagine the yes/no/module checkbox is a custom feature)

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