Question

Currently I am using tkinter‘s askopenfilename in a quicklist editor for Ubuntu to get a file’s name and location. Although it works fine, the look and feel is not native.

Is there an easy alternative dialogue window, to navigate and get a file’s name and location?

Answer 1

Zenity

Zenity’s File Selection Dialog provides an easy and natively looking solution with the --file-selection option. The dialog provides a number of options.

See also Zenity’s man pages.

In its simplest form:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import subprocess

try:
    file = subprocess.check_output(["zenity", "--file-selection"]).decode("utf-8").strip()
    print(file)
except subprocess.CalledProcessError:
    pass

Gtk’s FileChooserDialog

Another option is Gtk’s FileChooserDialog, which produces, as one might expect, perfectly natively looking file chooser dialog windows.