[Pleased as I was to get mentioned in a lightning talk in this year’s YAPC, I noted that my mention was in the context of writing blog posts that “don’t contain much code.”¹  Well, fair enough: I’m a verbose bugger, and a wannabe writer, so my prose does tend to ramble.  But I can do code, dammit.  So, you know ... here’s some code.]

The other day I was working on my music library scripts,² and I needed a menu for something.  Now, there are oodles and oodles of modules on CPAN to help you write menus.  I’ve looked at most of them, and tried quite a few, but long ago I settled on using the -menu option in IO::Prompter, by the Damian.  For a nice, pretty menu layout—say, something you do as a central feature for a program—it’s tough to beat.  It’s not perfect, by any stretch, but it offers some very nice features, such as (optionally) not requiring ENTER after a menu choice.

But that’s not what I wanted in this case.  What I was looking for here was a quick, compact menu ... sort of like what you get when you’re interactively staging a commit in git (that is, git add -p, or, probably more commonly, git add -i then choose “patch”).  Specifically, the features I wanted were: