[syslinux] Opinion wanted on F-key help in the simple menu system

[Nazo]

On 3/5/07, H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> 3.40 is getting close to feature complete, with the one thing I really
> want to add is support for F-key help in the simple menu system.
>
> However, I'm not 100% sure how I want to do it.  This may seem trivial,
> but it actually matters.
>
> One option is to have the F-key help clear the screen and display text,
> similar to the way it would work at the plain boot prompt.
>
> Another option is to have the F-key help draw a window over the existing
> display and display the text there.
>
> The first option would make it easier to share help files with the
> command line prompt, but that may not really be that interesting.  It
> would also allow for changing the background (in vesamenu) if one would
> want to.  The second option I suspect would look better.
>
> Opinions?
>
>         -hpa

Just my two cents on this.  It strikes me that they could be kept
seperate.  Support showing a new menu on top of the old one, which
would be useful for submenus anyway, and have a system to allow
binding of those keys to any menu item (which could potentially
include hidden items if the user didn't want to show the "help" item.)
 A way to have unusable menu items could make it possible to add help
text.  Perhaps something like a MENU DISABLE option or even just a
seperate MENU TEXT entry.  (I started to say that these options
shouldn't be selectable in the menu with the cursor, but it struck me
that it's a great way to make it possible to scroll through a lot of
help text smoothly one line at a time.)

That's just my two cents anyway.  I'm a user, not a developer, so take
it as you will.