Menugen

CURRENTLY IN DEVELOPMENT, API IS NOT STABLE

menugen is a bash script which runs menugen scripts (specially formatted bash scripts) and renders them as a series of interactive menus using rofi or fzf.

Motivation

rofi is a great selector, and some great scripts have already been written which take advantage of rofi's features to make quick and easy-to-use menus driven applications. Some examples include:

• rofi-scripts
• Dave Davenport's RandomScripts
• teiler
• rofi-pass
• clerk

menugen's entire purpose is to make these types of programs easy to create and maintain.

Getting Started

To start, download menugen to your computer. Next, follow along with a couple of examples which you can find in the repository:

Example #1 - Hello World

First I'll show you the code, then I'll explain some basics about working with menugen.

#!../menugen

#begin main
name="Hello World"
add_item "Here we're adding an item to a menu"            'next' 'echo Running the item'
add_link 'Just a link, will not run an action'            'next'
add_exec 'Just runs an action, will terminate afterwards'        'echo Running the exec'
#end main

#begin next
name="Final menu"
prompt="See ya! > "
add_exec 'All done!' "echo Thanks for playing, come again sometime"
#end next

Save that in a file, maybe helloworld, chmod 700 it, then run with ./helloworld.

Output

There's a couple of things to notice right off the bat.

• menugen auto generates "back" menu options, filling in the name of the menu where necessary.
• It also auto generates a prompt if a custom one is not provided, as in the main menu.
• All the echo statements work exactly like you would expect them to.
• Any menu options which are decorations, or nops, will not terminate the application, but will instead, just reload the same menu
• Each menu has a begin and end statement
• menugen will always start at the main menu
• If you press rofi's quit button (default: ESC) at any time, the menu will terminate

TODO

• Add examples about dynamic menu creation, managing state, and reading rofi/fzf's selection
• Explain the difference between the graphical interface, menugen, and the command line interface, menugencli.
• Check the issue tracker