Programming and Scripting :: Front-end builder?

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the more I wondered how could there *not* be something like this already?

There actually was already a similar tool in DSL, named Lua-FLTK. Unfortunately it was apparently a one-shot project that was created six years ago and never updated. MurgaLua, on the other hand, is active and is already quite far beyond what Lua-FLTK was..

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Did you put together the example windows in those screenshots?

No. Shortly after murgaLua was released and added to DSL I just started messing around with it and posting the tests here. I guess since there weren't many existing murgaLua demos at the time, some of what I came up with ended up being added to the package. I've never experimented with it outside of Linux, but I assume that as long as you don't depend on os-specific applications the scripts should be portable [for example, use os.date() rather than os.execute("date")]. I'm not sure about how line breaks are handled, though. You may need to use a lot of semicolons =o)

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Yeah, I didn't realize that was Lua

It isn't Lua. Whiptail is a self-contained application which is independent of the shell, so it could be used with Lua, or Bash, or Perl, or whatever. It's simply a way to create menus and buttons in a console/xterm, from a script, without the need to program with ncurses.

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No, I'm thinking of Xvesa setup, one of the items referenced from DSL Setup. *That's* Lua, right?

Correct. Or more specifically, it's Lua and FLTK...Lua being the language that does all the work, and FLTK being the buttons.

I have tried to remember to name all my Lua/Fltk stuff with the suffix of .lua. So a simple find command should give you many many examples. Most all of which date prior to murgaLua and have been converted. The whole idea to adopt Lua/Fltk was to provide a simple GUI frontend to command line programs. I wanted something that provided more than Dialog / Whiptail.

Last time I counted, DSL has over 55 Lua Lua/Fltk programs.

original here.