choice: a small console based menu selector, inspired by dmenu

choice is a command-line application that displays an interactive menu to the user. Like dmenu (a graphical menu), it outputs the selected item to the standard output, so that the result can be piped to another command.

Requirements

Tested on linux and macOS, doesn’t require any dependency to build.

Install

The general installation instructions can be followed to install the program. It is packaged in our Gentoo overlay as app-misc/choice.

You can clone the repository here.

Usage

choice reads entries from stdin and will output the selection in stdout. The user can filter displayed entries with the fuzzy search feature, by simply typing the search text.

Type choice -h for a list of option, alternatively, man choice.

choice can be used to wrap a number of commands and define convenient macros. Some examples are provided in the choice repository, see example.sh.

In particular, one can grep for a symbol in a source code repository, pipe the results into choice so the user can choose a match, and open the corresponding file at the corresponding line in a text editor. This is called vgrep in the example file. Another interesting application is to redefine bash’s history navigation (ctrl+r) to use choice, for a more convenient experience searching the history. See the bind example in the examples file.

For more examples, checkout this blog post

choice was created by syg, who had the idea of a command-line dmenu. Originally it was a simple 50-lines bash script. Further features were added by fxc and syg. It got eventually rewritten in C, to improve performance for filtering the results when the search feature was used.

choice is MIT-licensed.

Here is a demo gif: