makefilemenu 0.1

Console menu for Makefiles

makefilemenu

Provide a console menu interface for a Makefile.

The canonical use of the system is to have a quick and stupid way to document commands one would like to run, while at the same time making it extremely easy to run, without memorizing anything. Because I'm (ab)using "make", it is also very easy to run a particular target from the command line without using the menu system.

Of course nothing stops you from using the tool for a more regular Makefile.

Description

This is a very simple system to create a menu from the Makefile. You annotate your Makefile as follows:

# menu title: My title

# menu item: a
.PHONY: hello
hello:
	echo hello world

# menu item: b
.PHONY: foo
foo:
	echo foo bar

In other words, just add "# menu title" in the file once, and "# menu item: <ch>" to create a command from a make file target. Then running "makefilemenu Makefile" shows:

===== Development tools =====
a: hello  b: foo

Choice: 

You can choose one of the commands, and the corresponding target is made. To exit, press Control-C or Control-D. Regular "make" usage is not interfered, so you can still say "make foo hello" on the command line to make both targets.

You can also add a few clauses to the Makefile, so that running makefilemenu is the default target, and your file can be simply executed:

#!/usr/bin/env -S make -f
# -*- makefile -*-

thisfile := $(lastword $(MAKEFILE_LIST))

.PHONY: menu
menu:
    @makefilemenu $(thisfile)