Eel - ask for directory input

Question

I am developing modern-looking local app in Python with Eel and I want to open OS's default dialog to select directory. But I have found that Eel does not provide that.

I have tried:

• dialog from HTML/JS, but browser provides just dialog for file/s selection.
• local dialogs from other libraries, but they are really ugly and not using the default one, for example:

Tkinter (ttk is not that much better):

tkfilebrowser:

Anybody knows, how can I open OS's default directory selection via some simple lightweight library/eel? (at least on Linux-Ubuntu and Windows)

Or are there any other lightweight alternatives to eel, that would do that? I know about pywebview, but it is slower than eel and it is not that lightweight.

Answer 1

I don't think there is any way to change how the tkinter folder selection dialog looks. But you can use something like this (should work on Linux):

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
from time import sleep


COMMAND = "zenity --file-selection --directory"

def ask_folder() -> str:
    # Open a new process with the command
    proc = Popen(COMMAND, shell=True, stdout=PIPE)
    # Wait for the process to exit
    while proc.poll() is None:
        sleep(0.1)

    # Read the stdout and return the result
    stdout_text = proc.stdout.read()
    directory = stdout_text.decode().strip("\n")
    if directory == "":
        return None
    else:
        return directory

folder = ask_folder()
print(f"Selected: \"{folder}\"")

If you change the COMMAND, based on the OS, you should be able to get this to work on all OSes.