This simple fork of B-Menu is intended to read from configuration files found in the Current Working Directory, as opposed to the home folder.

B-Menu is a minimalistic general purpose terminal menu written in C. It was designed to replace terminal-based login managers such as CDM. However, it can easily serve as a simple terminal menu for any situation where you would like to execute a command from a set of menu selections.

B-Menu has zero dependencies, and it is intentionally feature-minimal. This keeps it easy to install, configure, and run.

Note that due to the way I use the extended ascii character set to display menu borders and shading, it is not portable to windows systems. (It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!)

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See COPYING for more details.

First, make sure you have the ncurses library installed:

ls /usr/include | grep ncurses.h

If the ncurses.h header file is not present, you may need to install the library. On Ubuntu, type:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ncurses-dev

If you are using a different flavor of linux, search your available packages for "ncurses" and install it.

After ensuring ncurses is installed:

git clone https://github.com/bartobri/bmenu.git
cd ./bmenu/src
make

This will create the executable file bmenu. Most users will want to copy it to /usr/bin, but you can place it anywhere you like.

By default, b-menu looks for menu options in $HOME/.bmenu (use -c to override, see below). This file should consist of one menu option and one command on each line, seperated by a colon.

Example:

Clear Screen:/usr/bin/clear
Dir Listing:/usr/bin/ls -l

Use the -c option to override the default menu file path:

bmenu -c /path/to/menu/file

Use the -t option to override the default menu prompt:

bmenu -t 'Choose an Option:'

To run b-menu when you login, place the following code in $HOME/.bash_profile:

if [[ "$(tty)" == '/dev/tty1' ]]; then
    [[ -n "$BMENU_SPAWN" ]] && return
    export BMENU_SPAWN=1
    # Avoid executing bmenu when X11 has already been started.
    [[ -z "$DISPLAY$SSH_TTY$(pgrep xinit)" ]] && exec bmenu
fi

If you do this, it is best to include a menu option to launch a shell. Add the following to your menu options file:

Shell:/bin/bash --login