multiselect

Select multiple strings at the same time, allowing to choose one when pasting.

• run the program passing a number of strings on the command line: multiselect 'a string' 'another' 'a third one'
• middle click on a window to paste: the strings are shown, and pressing for example 1 the first is pasted: a string

The strings can also be passed as lines of a text file on standard input: multiselect - < file

example: pasting the commandline arguments

As an example, after running multiselect John Smith '2030 Blue Ave.' Simonville IL and middle-clicking on the second field of a web form, the state is this:

the user can click '2' to have Smith pasted. Alternatively, the string to paste can be chosen by moving down with cursor keys and pressing Enter.

example: pasting tabular data from a file

The following file is to be posted to a web form that has a textfield for the name, surname, address, city and state of residente.

John,Smith,2030 Blue Av.,Simonville,IL
Lucas,Ortega,99 Green St.,Springfield,OH
Robert,Pierre,1 Yellow Blvd.,Mongtown,NY

Instead of selecting and pasting each field of each person, a script can run multiselect on the data of each person, like this:

    cat data.txt | \\
    while read A;
    do
        echo "$A" | tr ',' '\\n' | multiselect -
    done

The result is:

    selected strings:
       1: John
       2: Smith
       3: 2030 Blue Av.
       4: Simonville
       5: IL

    middle-click and press 1-5 to paste one

The data of the first person is ready: to paste the name, middle-click on the textfield for the name in the web form and press '1'. For the surname, middle-click on the textfield for the surname and press '2', and so on. Alternatively, go down with cursor keys and press 'Return', When the form is full and submitted, a further middle-click followed by key 'q' terminates multiselect so that the script proceeds to the second line.

example: pasting multiple strings selected interactively

The strings John Smith, 2030 Blue Ave and Simonville IL are scattered around a text file, hard to be found by scripts.

Open the text file and start multiselect with no argument.

Select John Smith in the text file and press ctrl-shift-z. Then, select 2030 Blue Ave and press ctrl-shift-z. Finally, select Simonville IL and press ctrl-shift-z.

The strings are now ready to be pasted: middle-click on the text field for the name and press '1', middle-click on the field for the address and press '2', middle-click on the field for the city and press '3', as above.