Subject: 9menu program available

From: [email-masked] (Arnold Robbins)
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 1994 12:19:46 -0500

With considerable help from David Hogan, I have written `9menu.' It
is like xmenu, in that you provide menu items and commands that go
with them on the command line. 9menu pops up a window containing
the list of items, and executes the corresponding command when a button
is pressed.

It was inspired by the GWM blit code's way of starting up remote
windows, I wanted something similar to use under 9wm (yes, it exists,
and is due to be released RSN. I've been beta-testing it).

9menu allows you to write your own menus and customize the behavior
to suit you, without the headaches of a .twmrc or .mwmrc. It is
real easy to have one item spawn another, giving a similar effect to
pull-right menus.

Here is how I use it, one for remote systems, the other for programs
I may want to run. Being lazy, I have xterm in both. I still use the 'rxterm'
script, but that's mostly for convenience. (This is from my .xinitrc.
The -geometry strings are to get 9wm to place the windows iconified.)

9menu -geometry 67x136-4+477 -iconic -popdown -label Remotes \
	'solaria:rxterm solaria.cc.gatech.edu' \
	'burdell:rxterm burdell.cc.gatech.edu' \
	'chrome:rxterm chrome.cc.gatech.edu' \
	'emory:rxterm emory.mathcs.emory.edu' \
	'acme:rxterm acme.gatech.edu' \
	'gnu:rxterm gate.gnu.ai.mit.edu' \
	'xterm:rxterm xterm' \
	exit &
9menu -geometry 103x102-3+624 -iconic -popdown -label 'X programs' \
	'xterm:rxterm xterm' \
	xtetris xlock '9wm restart:9wm restart' '9wm exit:9wm exit' exit &

This isn't as earth-shattering as sam, 9term, or 9wm, but for me, at least,
it fills a previously empty hole in the total environment.

Oh yes, where to get it:

	ftp.cc.gatech.edu:/pub/people/arnold/9menu.shar.gz

Let me know if there are any questions are problems, I've only tested
it under SunOS 4.1.3 with X11R5.

Arnold

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From: [email-masked] (Steve_Kilbane)
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 1994 04:32:41 -0500

> I wanted something similar to use under 9wm (yes, it exists,

[drool]

> it fills a previously empty hole in the total environment.

Interesting. I think it could possibly do with some feedback to the user,
though - 9term appears really quickly, but something like xrn takes quite
a while, and I'd hate to think what will happen when I'm running on one of
my heavily-loaded machines. Perhaps the window label could change temporarily
to "spawning", or something....

> it under SunOS 4.1.3 with X11R5.

Well, I'm running it under SunOS 5.3 (so all bets are off, yeah, I know, still),
and as usual, 9term's giving funny stty behaviour. If I spawn a 9term with
args "-p9font fixed -unix" from Sun's menu, I get a reasonable pty. If I spawn
one with the same args from 9menu, I need to reset intr and erase to ^C and ^?,
respectively. I haven't looked into detail yet why this might be, but I was
wondering if anyone's got any ideas.

steve

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From: [email-masked] (Steve_Kilbane)
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 1994 04:47:54 -0500

I wrote:

> If I spawn

scratch that. it appears to be ok, now. I think what happened is that I
started 9menu from a 9term, and then exited the 9term itself. So perhaps
9menu's own pty settings were being reset by the system, and future
9terms inherited these. Having 9menu starting up along with everything
else means that 9menu gets the console's settings, and they're ok.

This may be complete gibberish, but it sounds reasonable. :-)

steve