Features

  • Plugins (or modules) support: menu items, menus, forms and external scripts can be packaged for software distribution or to easily add functionalities;
  • Shortcuts permits to go directly to a specific menu or form; the list of available shortcuts can be obtained calling CCFE with option -s;
  • Data persistency: form fields can be defined as persistent, so their value is mantained between CCFE program executions;
  • The command or script executed in CCFE can be saved as shell script immediately usable from CLI;
  • If you want to distribute a software application with the CCFE interface, it is possible to include the required menus and forms in its software package, so it is immediately accessible in the CCFE main menu;
  • It is possible to call interactive commands or other curses-based commands (for example top(1)) from a menu or a form;
  • Multilingual support is not yet available, but all messages can be completely customized or translated;
  • Screen layout and video attributes can be configured;
  • Instances support: CCFE can be invoked with different names, and every one have its private configuration, messages and collection of menu and forms. Sometimes, this can be better than shortcuts to group functionalities that requires many menus and forms;
  • Users can configure their private preferences and make their private forms and menus for every CCFE instance;
  • Dynamic forms: shell scripts can be embedded in forms and can change them;
  • Dynamic menus: items of menu can be added or removed by simply adding or removing a file in a directory;
  • Temporary shell escape;
  • Recursivity: a menu can call another menu or a form; a form can call another form;
  • Automatic management of options and arguments associated to form fields;
  • Programmable function keys F1,F2,..,F12;
  • Activity logging: executed commands can be logged; users can dump fields data in the logfile;
  • Minimal dependencies: only Perl and Perl Curses module are required.