Dialog Widgets

Dialogs are toplevel windows which are important tools to most applications. The dialogs have many uses ranging from displaying simple messages to full fledged installation forms and other questionaires. Although an application has a basic window, a dialog window is a separate window with other information displayed. A dialog window can be made ‘modal’ which means that the I/O is directed to that dialog. To get it completely right, that is, the window manager keeps the dialog on top amongst other things, the dialog must have the application window as its transient parent window.

Prefab dialogs

There are already many dialog types made for special purposes. For example there are;

• A dialog to show informational messages.
• An about dialog to show something about the application.
• A file chooser dialog to select a file or directory.
• A color chooser dialog to select a color.
• An application chooser dialog to start external programs.
• A dialog to select fonts.
• A dialog to show and select from a list of recently use files.
• For Unix lovers there are dialogs to setup printer configurations and to print files.