26.16 Using Dialog Boxes

A dialog box is a special kind of menu for asking you a yes-or-no question or some other special question. Many Emacs commands use a dialog box to ask a yes-or-no question, if you used the mouse to invoke the command to begin with.

You can customize the variable use-dialog-box to suppress the use of dialog boxes. This also controls whether to use file selection windows (but those are not supported on all platforms).

A file selection window is a special kind of dialog box for asking for file names. You can customize the variable use-file-dialog to suppress the use of file selection windows, even if you still want other kinds of dialogs. This variable has no effect if you have suppressed all dialog boxes with the variable use-dialog-box.

For Gtk+ version 2.4 and newer, Emacs use the Gtk+ file chooser dialog. Emacs adds a toggle button that enables and disables showing of hidden files (files starting with a dot) in that dialog. The variable x-gtk-show-hidden-files controls whether to show hidden files by default.

For Gtk+ versions 2.4 through 2.10, you can select the old file dialog (gtk-file-selector) by setting the variable x-gtk-use-old-file-dialog to a non-nil value. If it is nil, Emacs uses gtk-file-chooser. If Emacs is built with a Gtk+ version that has only one file dialog, this variable has no effect.

Emacs adds help text to the Gtk+ file chooser dialog. The variable x-gtk-file-dialog-help-text specifies the text to add; if it is nil, that disables the added text.