From: Steve Litt <slitt@...>
Date: 2005-12-23T06:31:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby version of UMENU

On Thursday 22 December 2005 01:56 pm, Gregory Brown wrote:
> On 12/22/05, Steve Litt <slitt@earthlink.net> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > If anyone wants a keystroke-only menu system that works on any
> > kind of *nix box, UMENU is the answer. Originally written in
> > Perl, I just ported UMENU to Ruby, have been using it for
> > several days, and it appears to work perfectly, although the
> > error handling is crummy and documentation nonexistant.
>
> Interesting.  However, what advantages would this have over using
> HighLine? (Aside from being able to use EMDL files originally
> meant for perl programs, which is certainly neat)
>
> http://highline.rubyforge.org/

Short answer: I don't know enough about Highline to answer this 
question authoritatively.

Longer answer: Highline appears to be a programming tool, used by a 
programmer, to quickly assemble the user interface for a command 
line app. UMENU is a program, used by a user, to implement a menu 
system that calls other programs. This menu system can easily be 
assembled with an editor, either in native UMENU .mnu files, or in 
EMDL converted to .mnu.

Highline has ALL elements of user interface -- menus, picklists, 
edits, validation. UMENU has only a keystroke driven menu, with 
optional prompted argument substitution, where the menu asks the 
user for an argument and the user types it in.

My impression would be that a programmer would apply Highline to one 
specific program, or a small group of programs. UMENU would be 
applied by a user (granted a literate one) to all the programs 
he/she uses frequently.

The advantages of UMENU would be speed of integration and minimum 
debugging, as well as being doable by a mere power user. The 
advantages of Highline would be the ability to craft a complete 
user interface for an app.

From what I read about Highline, Highline and UMENU are totally 
different tools that can't really be compared. Indeed, I could 
easily forsee several Highline-enabled apps called from a UMENU 
menu system.

That's the long answer :-)

SteveT

Steve Litt
http://www.troubleshooters.com
slitt@troubleshooters.com