MenuGenie

Rust library for managing multi-level terminal menus. It provides simple builder API for creating nested menus.

Usage

A simple example application simple.rs

Menu actions

There are several menu actions that can execute when user selects a menu item

• Back - Goes back to the previous menu
• BackToStart - Goes back to the firts menu
• Quit - Quits the menu
• Navigate - Navigates to the menu with provided id
• Nothing - Used when we actualy want to execute some other code.

When the menu encounters the Nothing action it will return with Ok(Some((menu_id, menu_item_id))) so we can match against the returned touple. See the simple.rs example.

Builder

Builder starts of with empty vector of menus.

When we call with_menu(id) we insert another menu with the provided id.

with_menu_item(prompt, action) adds a generic menu item with the provided message and action. Each menu item has an id that is auto-generated when menu item is added to the menu. That menu item id is used when user makes a selection. Menu items are added to the last added menu so menu must exist before we add any menu items.

with_back_button() adds a menu item with text "Back", action Back and id 0.

with_quit_button() adds a menu item with text "Quit", action Quit and id 0.

Note If you want a back and a quit button at the same time you can add one with provided "shortcut" function and other with with_menu_item function.

Starting menu id is set when first menu is added but it can be modified with with_starting_menu function.

Finally to get a MenuGenie instance simply call build.

MenuGenie struct

MenuGenie struct holds the menus and the starting menu id. It works by saving a callstack of menu ids.

It has two functions for running the menu:

• prompt Function reads the last menu id from the callstack and prompts the user. Maybe we started a menu and an error happend, we can continue from the last menu that was displayed just by calling prompt again.

• restart Function first clears the callstack and puts starting menu id back on it, then calls prompt. It's useful if we want to start the menu from the beginning again.

Note when we call build on MenuBuilder it places starting menu id onto the callstack so we can just call run.

Future

It the future I plan on adding more features and customizations to the library. If you have some ideas fell free to let me know. These are some ideas that came to my mind:

• Configuration for setting the default quit and back button texts, Callbacks for automatically handling input and parsing errors, etc.
• Dynamic menu item that is controlled by some condition. For example we want to display some menu item if user is logged in or not.

Contributions

Contributions and suggestions are always welcome. Fell free to participate in this project.