Smenu, a command-line advanced selection filter and a menu builder for terminal

What is it?

smenuis a selection filter just like sed is an editing filter.

This simple tool reads words from the standard input, presents them in a cool interactive window after the current line on the terminal and writes the selected word, if any, on the standard output.

After having unsuccessfully searched the NET for what I wanted, I decided to try to write my own.

I have tried hard to made its usage as simple as possible. It should work, even when using an old vt100 terminal and is UTF-8 aware.

The wiki ( https://github.com/p-gen/smenu/wiki ) contains screenshots and animations that detail some of the concepts and features of smenu.

How to build it?

smenucan be built on every system where a working terminfo development platform is available. This includes every Unix and Unix like systems I am aware of.

Please use the provided build.sh to build the executable. This script accepts the same arguments as configure , type build.sh --help the see them.

The script autogen.sh is also provided if you need to generate a new configure script from configure.ac and Makefile.am . The GNU autotools will need to be installed for this script to work.

How to install it?

Once the build process has finished, a simple make install with the appropriate privileges will do it

Some examples.

Linux example.

This program should work on most Unix but if you are using Linux, try to type the following line at a shell prompt (here: "$ " ):

$ R=$(grep Vm /proc/$$/status \
      | smenu -n20 -W $':\t\n' -q -c -b -g -s /VmH)
$ echo $R

Something like this should now be displayed with the program waiting for commands: (numbers are mine, yours will be different)

VmPeak¦    23840 kB
VmSize¦    23836 kB
VmLck ¦        0 kB
VmHWM ¦     2936 kB
VmRSS ¦     2936 kB
VmData¦     1316 kB
VmStk ¦      136 kB
VmExe ¦       28 kB
VmLib ¦     3956 kB
VmPTE ¦       64 kB
VmSwap¦        0 kB

A cursor should be under "VmHWM " .

After having moved the cursor to " 136 kB" and ended the program with <Enter> , the shell variable R should contain: " 136 kB" .

Unix example.

The following command, which is Unix brand agnostic, should give you a scrolling window if you have more than 10 accounts on your Unix with a UID lower than 100:

$ R=$(awk -F: '$3 < 100 {print $1,$3,$4,$NF}' /etc/passwd \
      | smenu -n10 -c)
$ echo $R

On mine ( LANG and LC_ALL set to POSIX ) it displays:

at      25 25  /bin/bash      \
sys     0  3   /usr/bin/ksh   +
bin     1  1   /bin/bash      |
daemon  2  2   /bin/bash      |
ftp     40 49  /bin/bash      |
games   12 100 /bin/bash      |
lp      4  7   /bin/bash      |
mail    8  12  /bin/false     |
named   44 44  /bin/false     |
ntp     74 108 /bin/false     v

Note the presence of a scrollbar.

Testing and reporting.

The included testing system is relatively young, please be indulgent.

IMPORTANTthe testing system has some dependencies, please read the test/README.rst before going further.

WARNINGrunning all the test by running ./tests.sh in the tests directory will take some time (around 15 min for now).

NOTEon some systems like *BSD some tests may fail. This can be explained by differences in posix/libc/... implementations. This can notably occur when some specific regular expressions or uncommon UTF-8 byte sequences are used.

If a test fails for unknown reason, then please send me its directory name and the relevant .bad file.

If you are hit by a bug that no test covers, then you can create a new test in the tests directory in a existing or new directory, read the tests/README.rst file, use an existing test as model, create an .in file and a .tst file and send them to me as well as the produced files.

Interested?

Please use the included man page to learn more about this little program.