- INTRODUCTION
Animenu is intended as a companion program to the brilliant lirc project. Not unlike the osdmenu program by Toby Jaffey, this program provides a menu system, navigable via an infra-red remote control, and capable of lauching programs. However, while osdmenu is utilitarian, animenu is intended to be over the top and ostentatious - use it for showing off the flexibility of Linux to Windoze users!
Animenu can provide animations for the menus appearing and collapsing, and uses the Xft extension for translucency. (Unfortunately, as with my previous project, irmix, the translucency is a fake - if the contents of windows under the menus should change, the changes won't show through...)
NEW FOR VERSION 0.3:
This release begins a move away from static menus. Alexander Belov has
contributed a patch allowing the contents of a directory (with regexp pattern
matching) to be used as a menu - ideal for use in conjunction with mplayer,
xmms, etc.
Animenu is released under the GPL version 2; for details please see the file "COPYING".
This is my second Linux project, so please feel free to provide me with feedback and constructive criticism.
- USAGE
Animenu takes the following options:-h --help display a help message -v --version display version -d --daemon run in background -f --font use specified font
(X11 fontspec, as returned by xfontsel) -n --fontname specify font by family name only
(i.e. Times, Mistral, etc.) -c --fgcolor use specified foreground color -s --selectfgcolor color of selected item -t --menutimeout how long before menu dissapears (0 for no timeout) -a --menuanimation menu animation speed (microseconds) -D --dump dump menu structure to screen
Many thanks to Kresimir Kukulj for implementing most of these options.
Config file:
A new feature for version 0.2 is the ability to use a configuration file. Thanks to Massimo Maricchiolo for implementing this feature.
The config file is searched at ~/.animenu/animenurc - an example file can be found in the examplemenus directory, and the options are well documented within this file.
Commands for use in .lircrc:
The following commands can be used in your .lircrc file:
Show
Next
Prev
Select
Back
The meanings of these commands should be self-explanatory!
How to define menus:
The menus themselves are defined in text files; at startup animenu will attempt to open "root.menu" and if that fails, it will try to load "~/.animenu/root.menu"
Each menu item is defined on a set of three lines, and can take one of the following forms:
item
<Item title>
<command>
menu
<Submenu title>
<filename of submenu>
Thanks to Alexandar Belov, you can also use:
browse /full/path/regexp_pattern
<Submenu title>
<command, to be called with selected file as an argument>
and a recursive version of the above:
browse_recurse /full/path/regexp_pattern
<Submenu titlei>
<command, to be called with selected file as an argument>
An example menu set, demonstrating the use of all four entry types can be found in the examplemenus directory.
Whitespace at the beginning of each line is ignored, so you can use indenting to make the file easier to read.
Like the root menus, submenu files will be sought first in the current directory, and if that fails, in ~/.animenu/
Please note: There is currently no protection against circular references!
- CONTACT
I can be contacted at:
blackfive@fakenhamweb.co.uk
--
Alastair M. Robinson