Diago is a tool which allows to easily create hierarchy of menus, and browse such menus. The name of the tool means “DIAlog GO” – the tool “go”, which is actually a frontend over another tool, “dialog”.

For example, imagine, you have a lot of accounts on a bunch of Unix servers, and need to be able to connect to each of them, but do not want to remember all the hostnames, logins and passwords. Now you can create a menu listing all of the servers, put the required commands/scripts to connect there, and after that just call a short command (“diago” or “diago.py”, or even “g”) – the menu with the list will be displayed, and you just choose the needed destination, and voila, you are connected! Moreover, you can group such servers and create submenus, you can make each server into a menu if there are several ways to access it… But usages for such menus are numerous – they may be used anywhere if you want to put the large amount of information into a file once, and then choose one from a menu. Put all your sysadmin commands into a large menu, so that you only choose between them, rather than remember the long command lines and argument lists? Automate your typical actions? Do whatever you want with this tool – it is just a hammer, and it is you who decide what nails to hit.

Diago is a Python program (called “diago”, but, for your convenience, you are highly suggested to make an alias like g referring to it, if it is not done already by the maintainer of this package; the following description assumes that it is done already, and the tool can be executed by “diago” command). It may be called with or without command line options; calling the tool by just “diago” displays a menu in your console, and the “default” menu is generated, upon the configuration file “~/diago/config”. Additional options let you decide whether a console menu or graphical menu is generated, select the file which stores the structure of your menu, and even automatically browse into deeper level of generated menu.

This tool appeared due after the experience of using a great SecureCRT terminal in Windows, and the lack of the tools that would allow to create a simple “menu to remotely log in” in Linux. Initially (in 2007) it has been called just “go” (as in, “you can go anywhere with this tool”), but then renamed to “diago” in 2009, after the appearance of Go programming language which used the go binary extensively for its own purposes.

In practice, making an alias to just g is even better than go.

You can use this option if you want to generate a menu from the information stored in the specified file. Calling “go” without “-f” or “--file” option is equal to calling “go -f ~/.diago/config”. The structure of such files is described below, in the section “MENU STRUCTURE”. Do not forget that you may create aliases in your shell, for example (in bash):

alias goapache="diago -f ~/.diago-apacheconfig"

You likely will create at least one file describing the menu structure, “~/.diago/config”. This will be the default file used by diago. But you can create multiple files, and call “go” with option “-f FILENAME”, executing appropriate menus. The file with the menu structure contains the following distinct syntax components:

[
  ('action1', 'action1 description', 'execute', 'echo o1'),
  ('action2', 'action2 description', 'execute', 'echo o2')
]

Usually (and this is suggested for readability) each

('action1', 'action1 description', 'execute', 'echo o1')

Option part 1 is the Option Name (which must be unique within each level of menu/submenu) – this is displayed on the left part of the displayed menu and is the required field; Option part 2 is the Option Description – it is displayed on the right part of the displayed menu and may be omitted; Option part 3 is the Option Type; currently it accepts the following values: 'execute', 'expect', 'menu'; Option part 4 is the Option Value; depending upon the Option Type, it contains either a text string or a submenu.

If Option Type is 'execute' for some option in a menu, the Option Value must contain the string with a shell command (or several commands), which will be executed when this option is chosen in the menu.

If Option Type is 'expect' for some option in a menu, the Option Value must contain the string containing the expect script which will be executed when this option is chosen in the menu. For details on the expect syntax, read the documents on expect interpreter and consult the official expect website at http://expect.nist.gov.

If Option Type is 'menu' for some option in a menu, the Option Value must contain the submenu, which is just a usual

('menu1', 'menu1 description', 'menu', [
    ('submenu action1', 'action1 description', 'execute', 'echo 1')
    ('submenu action2', 'action1 description', 'execute', 'echo 1')
])

• \xhh – character with hex value hh,
• \ooo – character with octal value ooo,
• \N{name} – character named name in the Unicode database (Unicode string only, see below)
• \uxxxx – character with 16-bit hex value xxxx (Unicode strings only, see below),
• \Uxxxxxxxx – character with 32-bit hex value xxxxxxxx (Unicode strings only, see below),

The opening string quote may be prefixed with u or U symbol, what makes it a “Unicode string”, for example: u'Hello world \N{dram}'. Such string may accept Unicode characters, and also \N{name}, \uxxxx and \Uxxxxxxxx escape sequences.

The opening string quote may also be prefixed with r or R symbol, what makes it a “raw” string, for example: r'Hello world'. Within such “raw” strings, the character following the backslash symbol (unless the backslash symbol is the last symbol in the string) is not interpreted, that is r'\n' string mean a string with two symbols, “backslash” and “n`”.

If raw modifier is used together with Unicode modifier, Unicode modifier should go first, for example: ur'Hello world'.

The string may also be surrounded with triple single-quotes (or double-quotes); within such triple quotes, the escape symbols are not interpreted, backslash symbol is left as is, and single and double quotes can be used freely (until there are no more than three them in a row, what stands for the end of triple-quotes string). This is especially useful for embedding the expect scripts into the menu (value “expect” for the Option Type).

Example:

send_user "Connecting to server...\n"
set timeout 60
spawn ssh server.tld
interact

Any whitespace symbols (space, newline, tabulation, etc) may be freely used between