sentaku: More menu-like options for the cli

I thought I was being clever a year ago because I strung together slmenu and a few other random gimmicks, and came up with something like dmenu for text-only environments.

sentaku has that beat by a mile.

 

pipe text into sentaku, and it makes a full-screen pick-and-choose application from it. It’s complete with highlighted selection, vi-like or arrow-key navigation, help cues on-screen and best of all, a speedy response time.

The selected text is passed out of sentaku as-is, which makes it ideal for spawning applications or sending selections through to scripts. In other words:

eval $( echo "mc htop alsamixer elinks" | sentaku )

Does more or less the same thing as what I was doing with slmenu. Of course, mine had one-key popup menu access, and snazzy animated gifs. 🙄 But the same could be done with sentaku, with a little effort.

In case you’re thinking this must take a masterful command of assembly language to accomplish, it turns out that sentaku is just a bash script (or zsh, if you prefer).

And of course sentaku can be used for other things too. It’s not tied to menu selection, although that was what came to mind first.

I really like sentaku and I’d like to see it appear in AUR, if not in Debian as well. Perhaps I shall look into that … 😐