On Sun, Nov 30, 2025 at 11:55:19AM -0800, Mike Castle wrote: > This is a user experience question. > > From the best that I can tell, buildlist and checklist are nearly > functionally equivalent.
They both work on predetermined lists, enabling or disabling items.
But there are differences (besides the obvious one of appearance):
checklist recognizes some options not mentioned for buildlist
(keeping in mind that I may have overlooked documenting the latter):
--default-item string
Set the default item in a checklist, form or menu box. Normally
the first item in the box is the default.
--item-help
Interpret the tags data for checklist, radiolist and menu boxes
adding a column which is displayed in the bottom line of the
screen, for the currently selected item.
--no-cancel
Suppress the “Cancel” button in checklist, inputbox and menu box
modes. A script can still test if the user pressed the ESC key
to cancel to quit.
--no-items
Some widgets (checklist, inputmenu, radiolist, menu) display a
list with two columns (a “tag” and “item”, i.e., “description”).
This option tells cdialog to read shorter rows, omitting the
“item” part of the list. This is occasionally useful, e.g., if
the tags provide enough information.
--no-tags
Some widgets (checklist, inputmenu, radiolist, menu) display a
list with two columns (a “tag” and “description”). The tag is
useful for scripting, but may not help the user. The --no-tags
option (from Xdialog) may be used to suppress the column of tags
from the display. Unlike the --no-items option, this does not
affect the data which is read from the script.
--visit-items
Modify the tab-traversal of checklist, radiolist, menubox and
inputmenu to include the list of items as one of the states.
This is useful as a visual aid, i.e., the cursor position helps
some users.
> The only difference being that, if --reorder is passed, buildlist
> allows reordering, so the user could change the order that results
> could be processed.
>
> Other than that... it kind of reminds me of lynx's ability to treat
> single SELECT as RADIO BUTTONs, since they are equivalent.
>
> But I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything obvious.
>
> Thanks,
> mrc
>
>
--
Thomas E. Dickey <[email protected]>
https://invisible-island.net
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
