Dialog is an application used in shell scripts which displays text user interface widgets. It uses the curses or ncurses library. The latter provides users with the ability to use a mouse, e.g., in an xterm.Dialog was created by Savio Lam (first reported version 0.3 was in 1994).It was further modified by several people.Since 1999 it has been maintained (and rewritten) by Thomas Dickey.At least one fork exists,a FreeBSD-only split into application and library in late 1994.