Lightbar Menus

Enabling arrow-key lightbar navigation on BBS menus

Lightbar menus add arrow-key navigation to the canned option list that Maximus prints for NOVICE-mode callers. Instead of reading a list and typing a hotkey, the caller sees a highlight bar they can move with the arrow keys and press Enter to select.

Lightbar mode is configured per-menu in the [custom_menu] table inside each menu’s TOML file (config/menus/*.toml). It is separate from the area-list lightbar settings in display.toml — see Lightbar Customization for those.

Basic Setup

Lightbar navigation requires three things:

lightbar_menu = true — turns on the highlight bar.
Valid boundaries — top_boundary and bottom_boundary must both be set with valid coordinates. Lightbar uses positioned rendering, so it needs to know the rectangle.
NOVICE help level — the caller must be in NOVICE mode. REGULAR and EXPERT always use the classic text path.

Without valid boundaries, lightbar_menu = true is silently ignored and Maximus falls back to the normal canned menu (text list + single-keystroke input).

Minimum Working Example

# config/menus/main.toml
option_width = 14

[custom_menu]
lightbar_menu = true
top_boundary = [8, 8]
bottom_boundary = [20, 61]

That’s enough. Maximus will render the canned option list inside the boundary with arrow-key navigation, hotkey detection, and Enter to select.

Recommended Additions

lightbar_margin — padding (in characters) on each side of every lightbar item. Default is 1. The effective cell width becomes option_width + (lightbar_margin × 2).
prompt_location — where the “Select:” prompt is drawn. Without it, the prompt prints inline after the last option, which can look odd with a bounded layout. Setting this prevents overlap.

[custom_menu]
lightbar_menu = true
lightbar_margin = 1
top_boundary = [8, 8]
bottom_boundary = [20, 61]
prompt_location = [23, 1]

Advanced: Colors and Layout

Lightbar Colors

The lightbar painter supports four color states, each specified as a ["Foreground", "Background"] pair using DOS color names:

[custom_menu.lightbar_color]
normal        = ["Light Gray", "Black"]
high          = ["Yellow", "Black"]
selected      = ["White", "Blue"]
high_selected = ["Yellow", "Blue"]

normal — non-selected option text
high — the hotkey character in a non-selected option
selected — the highlight bar (selected option)
high_selected — the hotkey character inside the highlight bar

If omitted, normal defaults to Light Gray on Black and selected defaults to Yellow on Blue.

Layout Controls

The [custom_menu] table also supports layout options that control how the option grid is arranged within the boundary:

option_justify — text alignment within each cell: "left", "center", or "right"
boundary_justify — where the option grid sits inside the boundary: "center center", "right bottom", etc.
boundary_layout — column distribution model: "grid", "tight", "spread", "spread_width", or "spread_height"
option_spacing — adds a blank row between option rows

These are covered in full detail — with visual examples, recipes, and troubleshooting — on the Canned & Bounded Menus page.

Maximus BBS

Documentation for Maximus BBS — Next Generation