I just mentioned fselect the other day, but it’s only by coincidence (and the fickle hand of Fate, as conveyed through ls vimwiki/ | shuf -n1) that I have iselect today.
iselect has all the hallmarks of fselect and other line selection tools, but seems to be conscious of its role as an intermediary.
That’s a kind of oddball thing to say, so let me explain.
Invariably, the curses-based selection tools that we’ve seen over the past couple of years all share the same idea: Accept a list or line of options, present them as a menu, and then return the result when cued. All the way back through fselect and sentaku and slmenu, that’s been the idea.
iselect does that, but can torque that idea just slightly, to allow for some other information to pass through.
For example, add the -K flag, and not only will you get the selection sent through STDOUT, but you’ll get the keypress your human used to designate it.
You can also confound your human by making everything in the list un-selectable. Imagine the hilarity. 😐
iselect will also allow multiple selections — done with the spacebar — or force single-selections. It can accept zero- or one-item lists, and allow your human to wander through that seemingly empty exercise, and come up with a selection. Or it can do the opposite, and exit as soon as it detects an empty list, and not waste anyone’s time.
Look at the help flags for iselect if you want those or other options; the version installed through AUR does not include a man page, but if you’ve used other selection tools in the past, you’ll have no trouble navigating it. iselect is in Debian-based distros as well.
I don’t spend enough time with selection tools like this to know if there’s one god-given tool that everyone relies on in their projects and adventures. For what I’ve seen of iselect though, if I was using a selection interface in my program, I think I’d go with this one. It seems to know why it’s there, and what its purpose is.
Inconsolation 