Since I’m on the subject of text-only systems … if you remember Remy, of the restored 286 fame, you might be interested in his SSHdialog script.
If you manage a lot of ssh connections, I can see where this would be useful. I’ll borrow his screenshot since I only have one connection and so it doesn’t look very impressive. 🙄
You probably get the point just by looking at that though. You’ll have to set up a hosts file with your available connections and the addresses for each.
After that, dialog takes over and you can skim and select from the list. Direct, clean and straightforward. Once again, it seems the simple solution might be the best. 😉
Motho ke motho ka botho 
The problem with dialog is the user interface is not the most efficient if you need to make a choice out of a list with minimal keystrokes.
I much rather use a dmenu with xmms-like matching style, or kingbash (which is very similar to dmenu but for the shell and has the great matching style – see https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=101010), or hell, even tab-completion.
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