Python – What’s the simplest cross-platform way to pop up graphical dialogs in Python

cross platformdialogpythonzenity

I want the simplest possible way to pop up simple dialogs in Python scripts. Ideally, the solution would:

Work on Windows, OS X, Gnome, KDE
Look like a native dialog on any OS
Require minimal code

To pop up a simple standard dialog should require only minimal code. Essentially you're just saying "Pop up a standard dialog with this text", or "Pop up a dialog with question x and feed response into variable y".

This is for simple scripts that would otherwise run on the command line. I don't want to know about GUI frameworks or have to set up code that says "start a GUI thread, register an event handler, configure some window properties, run a loop", etc. I don't want to have to set up a window or close the window afterward. I give it the text to put in the window and/or buttons and/or checkboxes, it returns what the user clicked on. Everything else should be taken care of automatically. For example:

message_box('File conversion complete')

for a standard dialog box with an "Ok" button, or

balloon_tip('File conversion complete')

for a system tray popup balloon, or

format = button_box('Which file format do you want?', 'JPG', 'PNG')

and they press one of the two buttons, and then format equals 'JPG', or

response = text_query('What would you like to name the file?')

and after they type in the box and press Ok, response now equals 'bananas.txt'. No other code required. No ugly command line prompts for the poor user.

I've listed Zenity and EasyGUI as example answers, since they're similar to what I want, but not perfect.

[Previously asked on Python Forum]

Best Answer

EasyGUI is a single file, and provides a simple way to work with Tkinter dialogs, but they're still ugly non-native Tkinter dialogs.

from easygui import msgbox
msgbox('Stuff')

Tkinter is ugly on Ubuntu TKinter is ugly on Windows 7

It can easily be installed using:

$ sudo pip3 install --upgrade easygui

There is a GitHub repository and documentation is very neat.

Previously, there was also a fork called EasyGuiTtk, which unfortunately is no longer available.

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To check if o is an instance of str or any subclass of str, use isinstance (this would be the "canonical" way):

if isinstance(o, str):

To check if the type of o is exactly str (exclude subclasses):

if type(o) is str:

The following also works, and can be useful in some cases:

if issubclass(type(o), str):

See Built-in Functions in the Python Library Reference for relevant information.

One more note: in this case, if you're using Python 2, you may actually want to use:

if isinstance(o, basestring):

because this will also catch Unicode strings (unicode is not a subclass of str; both str and unicode are subclasses of basestring). Note that basestring no longer exists in Python 3, where there's a strict separation of strings (str) and binary data (bytes).

Alternatively, isinstance accepts a tuple of classes. This will return True if o is an instance of any subclass of any of (str, unicode):

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What’s the best way to check if a file exists in C

Look up the access() function, found in unistd.h. You can replace your function with

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} else {
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You can also use R_OK, W_OK, and X_OK in place of F_OK to check for read permission, write permission, and execute permission (respectively) rather than existence, and you can OR any of them together (i.e. check for both read and write permission using R_OK|W_OK)

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