PyZenity

PyZenity is an easy to use interface to Zenity for Python.  Zenity is normally called from scripts by invoking it with a multitude of command line parameters that it uses to construct its interfaces.  This module hides the details of invoking the command and presents simple API functions like:

cancel = Question('Should I cancel the operation?')

Why PyZenity?

Well I originally wrote PyZenity a few years ago when I decided I wanted to learn how to use the new (in Python 2.4) subprocess module. Now I needed a command that I could use to experiment with and I thought, “hey, what better program then Zenity.” It takes lots of parameters, has well defined return values, and I could experiment right from the interactive shell because it spawned a GUI. So I wrote functions to call Zenity’s widgets and played around for a bit exercising some of the features of subprocess. When I was done I thought, “Maybe someone would be interested in this”, so I documented it and threw it up on my website. Lo and behold, a few people were and I occasionally get bug fixes for it.

Others have noted that the proper thing to do is use PyGTK to create interactive GUIs and I totally agree. But if your interest is in creating quick scripts to get the job done, PyZenity is much easier to use.

Note for Windows Users: PyZenity appears to work out of the box with the Windows version of Zenity here.

Download
The current version is 0.1.8.

Documentation
The documentation is available here.

Release Notes

  1. Version 0.1.8 – Austin Green sent in a patch to add missing options and streamline an internal dictionary.
  2. Version 0.1.7 – Shane Mclafferty pointed out that there is no “ok-label” and “cancel-label” parameters. Added an optional “ok_label” and “cancel_label” parameters to remedy this.
  3. Version 0.1.6 – Ben suggested that the GetDate function return a 4 digit year to make life a whole lot easier.
  4. Version 0.1.5 – Adds kwargs to functions to specify optional Zenity parameters like height, width, etc.
  5. Version 0.1.4 – Dietmar Thaler fixed a ValueError bug in PyZenity.List when using the boolstyle parameter.
  6. Version 0.1.3 – The PKG-INFO file says PyZenity is under the BSD License but it’s actually under the MIT License.  Thanks to Siegfried-Angel for pointing that out!
  7. Version 0.1.2 – Felix Hummel found and fixed an ImportError when using the GetDirectory function caused by a failure to import os.path.
  8. Version 0.1.1 – Fixed a bug with the GetDate function not taking into account locale while parsing the return from zenity.  Thanks to Matt Williams for finding the bug.
  9. Version 0.1 – Initial version.