I really tend to mostly play Adventure mode because DF is one of the more interesting rogue-likes and while its got a ways to go its got quite a bit to like. Anyway, I generally find the inventory management to be a little annoying and searching through items is not terribly fun when I probably won't pick any of it up but feel compelled to scour just in case something good is lying around.
I was thinking about of doing something like what Cataclysm: DDA did with their side bars. Basically list everything within eyesight in a side bar to the right. And use the cursor to navigate up and down while showing detail of the item at the bottom. It supports filtering by name and grouping by type. Its helps with navigating, filtering quickly through whatever is nearby. With tab key it allows swapping between items and npcs/monsters to get the gist of where everything around you.
Example:
It would also be nice to use the Surrounding area inventory manager which allows you drop stuff on any of the 9 surrounding squares or your inventory without having to go through the get/drop/remove menus for each item one at a time.
Example:
Anyway, the question part is has this already been done or anything like it? I dont really need to reinvent the wheel if already done. Or any examples of scripts that have similar complexity that I should review first?
Will the dfhack gui handle this? Presumably yes because I've done menus in the past though nothing this complicated. Anything I should be aware of if I try something like this? I did a site picker for my teleport mod which used the listpicker but this seems to be a bit more complex. I've done some ruby in the past but I'm most familiar with lua with dfhack so would try in lua.