Updated August 6, 2012 Bug fix for use on FreeBSD 8.x supplied by Devin Teske. Thanks! What is this? This is a sh/awk wrapper script to give the ports options setting screen more features: Extended descriptions for FreeBSD 8.3+ and 9.0+. Port maintainers can make descriptions longer and more explanatory. Auto-sizing of the option screen to fit the terminal window. Wider or taller windows can display more of the descriptions, or more options. Windows smaller than 80x24 also work. Older versions of dialog(1) had a bug in displaying descriptions that are longer than the available space. When an old version of dialog is detected, descriptions are cut to the available space. These earlier versions of dialog did not support the --item-help feature used to show extended descriptions, so only the trimmed description will be shown. Descriptions that have been trimmed will still end in a "+" to indicate that part of it has been trimmed. Installation Download http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/dialogwrapper/dialogwrapper.sh to /usr/ports/Tools/scripts. Make it executable. Edit /etc/make.conf: DIALOG="/usr/ports/Tools/scripts/dialogwrapper.sh" Testing long descriptions Open a terminal window and resize it, making it narrower than the default 80 columns. Try 60 or 70 columns. su to root and run 'make config' for a port that uses long descriptions. For example: # cd /usr/ports/audio/xmms2 # make config Descriptions that are too long to fit in the window are shown ending in a "+". Scroll downward through the settings to see that the missing part of the description is shown at the bottom of the screen. Testing auto-sizing Open a terminal window and resize it, making it taller than the default 24 lines. print/ghostscript9 is a good example. # cd /usr/ports/print/ghostscript9 # make config Work remaining to be done Cleanup of the code and additional comments. Testing. The trimming algorithm should break the description on whitespace to improve readability. fold(1) may be an easy way to do that.