Direct access to words

smenu provides a way to directly access all or part of all words.

These accesses are materialized on screen by a alphanumeric prefix in front of each word.

The options -N, -U, -F and -D are involved in this mode.

The -D option allows the user to give sub-options to tune the behaviour of the other options.

To access the desired word directly, the user just has to enter his number. Here is a short demonstration with default tunings:

smenu -t -N .

To enter a direct access index, the timing is important: the maximum delay between two digits must not be more than 0.6 second by default. If not the digits already entered will form a truncated index. As suggested above, this delay is configurable.

As said above too, it is possible to select the words that will benefit from direct access. In this page, only the -N and -U will be demoed. For more informations about the use of -F, see here. For the -D option a commented example can be found here.

To be able to only choose some words for direct access, just add a regular expression after -N or -U.

The difference between the two options is that -N will select all the words matching the expression while -U will select all the words except those matching the expression.

If there is no conflict with the other options present in the command line, then these options can be used without any regular expression in which case . is assumed which select all the words.

The following example shows a direct access restriction to words containing a a.

smenu -t -N a

Note that the word numbering is not the same. The selected words are always associated with numbers that follow each other with these options.

Words are still accessible even when they do not have an associated direct access number:

smenu -t -N a

If it is not desired, then just disable the other words by using the include option (-i) with the same regular expression.

smenu -t -i a -N a

Example using in exclude (-e) and un-number (-U) options:

smenu -t -e a -U a

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