Note: This page is now marked as obsolete and is here for historical reasons only.

iMessage

iPAQ (and GTK+) specific xmessage replacement

iMessage program displays a window containing a message from a command line or standard input. On the bottom of the window is row of command line defined buttons. Clicking on any of these buttons will cause iMessage to exit. Which button was pressed is both returned in exit status and printed to standard output.
Returned value is 0 for first button, 1 for second button and so on... Window close button is equivalent to most right button (usually "Cancel" button).

Usage

iMessage message [button1] [button2] ...
if 'message' is '-', stdin is used

Note: With Matchbox window manager, you need Matchbox v0.2 or higher for no fullscreen window.

Examples

Invocation:
iMessage "just a message" iMessage "Are you sure?" Yes No "I don't know" ls -1p | iMessage - lsmod | grep "ir" | iMessage - cat foo.txt | iMessage - Yes No

Evaluation:

#!/bin/bash
iMessage "Delete foo.txt?" Yes No Rename
RETVAL=$?
case "$RETVAL" in
 0)
  rm -f foo.txt
  ;;
 2)
  mv -f foo.txt foo.txt.old
  ;;
esac
#end

iMessage "Would you like to do it?" Yes No | other_script_that_reads_from_stdin
iMessage "Would you like to do it?" Yes No > any_file

Versions

version 0.1

first (not public) release
thoughts about comaptibility with old xmessage - rejected
gtk_dialog_new() and gtk_label_new() used, sometimes ugly on iPAQ :-(

version 0.2

first public release
major rewrite of interface
gtk_window_new(GTK_WINDOW_DIALOG) now used instead of gtk_dialog_new()
gtk_scrolled_window_new() now used instead of gtk_label_new()

Download

Source code: iMessage.c
Binary package: imessage_0.2_arm.ipk

Screenshots

simple message
(iMessage "just a message")

more complicated message
(ls -1p | iMessage - More buttons possible too)

Links

Familiar Linux (Linux distribution for iPAQ handhelds)

created: April 13, 2002, last modification: April 13, 2002