ls -l

[grahamperrin]

$ pwd
/home/grahamperrin/.cache/mozilla/firefox/58ectoj2.default/cache2
$ ls -hl entries | smenu -n 25 -c
The number of read words has reached the limit of 32767.
$ cd
$ ls -hl ~/Desktop | smenu -n 25 -c
 total      6980135                                                                                                                                                                                                  ┐
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 199K 31 Dec 18:40 103421818-42a1a700-4b96-11eb-8f7b-da2101465cb3.png                                                                                                   ║
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 164K 2  Dec 09:07 2020-12-02                                         14.48                           screenshot                 of             C          drive       ▶│
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 91K  9  Dec 00:28 2020-12-09                                         libchk.txt                                                                                        │
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 1.6M 2  Jan 12:42 2021-01-02                                         12:40                           helloSystem,               window         apparently inactive    ▶│
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 2.4K 23 Jan 07:58 2021-01-02.txt                                                                                                                                       │
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 2.5K 23 Jan 07:58 2021-01-23.txt                                                                                                                                       │
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 4.1K 13 Nov 09:46 application                                        form                            to                         vote           by         post.pdf     │
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 1.5M 21 Nov 08:55 Checkout                                           -                               Win                        My             Dream      Brighton    ▶│
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 5.9K 7  Oct 05:41 ClearURLsLogExport.json                                                                                                                              │
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 1.8M 29 Jan 10:56 Correspondence                                     re                              CZC54122KZ.pdf                                                    │
 drwxr-xr-x 2       grahamperrin grahamperrin 4B   24 Dec 07:09 Custom                                             UserAgent                       String                                                            │
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 1.0M 7  Dec 08:12 Ethics                                             Presentation.pptx                                                                                 │
 drwxr-xr-x 2       grahamperrin grahamperrin 19B  13 Dec 08:59 Exchange,                                          Outlook,                        Outlook                    Web            App                     │
 drwxr-xr-x 2       grahamperrin grahamperrin 4B   30 Jan 17:02 faq                                                                                                                                                  │
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 3.1K 7  Oct 15:03 ftime4.c                                                                                                                                             │
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 155K 21 Jan 18:43 FW_                                                Problems                        accessing                  SharePoint.msg                         │
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 771K 24 Sep 2019  gnome-keyring-daemon.png                                                                                                                             │
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 1.6G 31 Jan 02:18 hello-0.4.0_0D25-FreeBSD-12.1-amd64.iso                                                                                                              │
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 112B 31 Jan 01:45 hello-0.4.0_0D25-FreeBSD-12.1-amd64.iso.md5                                                                                                          │
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 556K 20 Jan 21:29 hid-over-i2c-protocol-spec-v1-0.docx                                                                                                                 │
 -rw------- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 144M 15 Jan 10:58 inkscape.core                                                                                                                                        │
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 897B 3  Dec 08:15 Keith                                              card.txt                                                                                          │
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 172B 30 Dec 18:53 locale.txt                                                                                                                                           │
 -rw-r--r-- 1       grahamperrin grahamperrin 2.4G 16 Dec 06:49 MOV012.mpeg                                                                                                                                          ▼
$ ```

Is each white space within the name of a file interpreted as a tab stop? 

Is there any reasonably simple way to have the file names listed normally?

I sought a few keywords in the manual page, couldn't find an answer. 

[p-gen]

Hello,

The limit of 32767 words can be adjusted by adding a configuration file. Look for words = 32767 in the manual page.

For your second point, smenu does not have the notion of filename it only sees words. It has options to change the global word and line separators but if you want to do more, you have two approaches:

• preprocess the input to add quotes
• consider each line as a word (add -W $'\n') and post-process it.