toys: Sun Nov 5 17:21:00 2006

Sun Nov 5 17:21:00 2006

tratmenu - clone of ratmenu (from the man page and my usage of it) using curses instead of X11. Takes the same options so that I can use it for some ultimately text-based applications (like picking surfraw engines from a list, or picking hosts-to-ssh-into from a generated list of things I have access to.)

This is another project that stalled until I started with the "simplest thing that can work"... one by one, I

• fleshed out the OptionParser
• grouped the menu commands into pairs
• initialized a curses ui that did nothing
• drew the labels in that ui
• started reacting to keys ('q' for quit)
• added selected-item highlighting
• added up and down support
• expanded the recognized keys to match the ratmenu manpage
• actually returned a value from the UI
• executed the back command or the selected command
• supported options.shell

Each of these was only a couple of minutes and mostly a matter of looking up parts of the curses API or the ratmenu manpage. There are still a few things that I don't care much about but may implement for completeness:

• snazzy vs dreary --style options
• --align left/center/right
• --fg/--bg colors

Also, I may add an explicit "if $DISPLAY is set, run the real ratmenu instead" option, just so that I can have a common command regardless of context, though that doesn't actually work for things which might or might not need a window unless I also add an xterm_or_not wrapper.