One of the great strengths of Linux is the whole raft of weird and wonderful open source utilities. That strength does not simply derive from the functionality they offer, but from the synergy generated by using them together, sometimes in conjunction with applications.

The Unix philosophy spawned a “software tools” movement which focused on developing concise, basic, clear, modular and extensible code that can be used for other projects. This philosophy remains an important element for many Linux projects.

Good open source developers writing utilities seek to make sure the utility does its job as well as possible, and work well with other utilities. The goal is that users have a handful of tools, each of which seeks to excel at one thing. Some utilities work well on their own.

This article looks at four tiny utilities that offer menu facilities. They get virtually zero coverage in the Linux press, so you may not have heard of them before, but they are well crafted and might just fit the bill.

Small Console Menu Utilities pdmenu Console menu program fzf General-purpose fuzzy finder for your shell sentaku Pipe at the command line into sentaku, and it presents a full-screen menu tmenu Dynamic menu for tty devices

Return to our complete collection of recommended free and open source software including our latest additions.

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