Yeah that'd have to be a deal breaker for what I'd been thinking. Well maybe, guess it's how someone chooses to apply it, zenity could actually work(seen people use it and yeppers agree it can be pretty), so thanks regardless. Would be less portable than what I'd been intending this for. Was mostly shooting for a here's a script, if you've got bash and the basic cmds/pkgs almost everything Nix on the planet includes out-of-box, good to go. Of course when I said somebody should do xy and z things, polish it all up into a so easy a caveman can do/use it script, meant somebody other than me.
Not familiar with whiptail or zenity either. Dumped a lot of time into polishing up a chroot.sh script, expanding on it to include a bunch of other stuff/related options. Between it and the cleanup.sh the scripts have ended up being just under 200 lines and somewhere around 35hrs invested by this point. Hit burn-out so shelved the idea for now.
Don't know if I'll ever get the thing finished, are still things I want to add, adjust or areas I haven't managed to work out effective solutions to address junk, at least to a point where I'm satisfied with how the final product would work. For now it's going back on the 2-dork list and likely end up circling back to it at some point in future. Mostly seems to have ended up being one of those CHIT, come too far to abandon things now situations. About formatting imo, at least for what I've got in mind here I actually like the raw command-line look. Think the main thing is that the dialogue clearly/effectively conveys what's going on, what options the user has, what to enter or press to make selections, at this or that point while the script is doing it's job.
Same for formatting and layout, using echo for blank/new lines = spacing. Making sure text isn't squished together or stretched out too much so it doesn't look ugly or weird. I seem to have settled on using capitals in this junk for emphasis added, important notices, warnings or things I want the user to be aware of and consider more closely. That's just falling back on long standing internet communication conventions/traditions, far as I'm aware capitalizing text has always been considered the equivalent of someone yelling.
So it's common sense when you see something in caps in something like a chroot script to understand it may be important. A user may want to pay attention to what's going on. Anyway that's what I've settled on in the (if it ever gets done) chroot.sh project. Pleased with some stuff, always room for improvement or enhancements and still don't think it's ready for prime time atm.