Persistent menus

["Caleb Land" <bokonon rochester rr com>]

Hello,
I'm writing a program (in python, with pygtk) that is used solely from the
keyboard.  My program
has a lot of screens, so I need an easy way for the user to access them.

The way that it's implemented now (in a curses-like interface) is I have a
menu displayed in the middle of the screen and the user presses the first
letter of a menu item to select it.  If it's a category, then a submenu
pops to the right where they can repeat the process until they get to a
leaf (hitting escape goes back one level)

Is there a way to make a popup menu persistent (until I tell it to
disappear) and bound to a window rather than 'floating' (so it acts like a
normal widget in terms of moving with the parent window)?

Or is there another widget that is more suited to this?  Right now I'm
making a column-view-like widget with the List widget.

If my explaination isn't enough I can get pictures of the current program.

Sincerely,
Caleb Land