Marking this draft for the moment.

It has one glitch that bugs me somewhat: headings get aligned with the item names rather than the left margin. That isn't the thing I'm after right now. I checked the Qt interface to see if it has the same problem, which it does, but also noticed that the menu had been changed to a fixed width font. This was commit c96a9ff. I specifically remembered supporting proportional fonts in Qt 4; it began its existence in nethack-i18n, which, as discussed in #1656, has to support tabbed columns.

So the problem that led to the Qt menus being made fixed width will apply to X11 (and Win32) also.

Changing the relevant menu (doextlist()) solved that problem, and created another. The command listings at the top become entirely part of the first column, causing the actual help listing to have a very wide first column. This affects both X11 and Qt.

A modest change to the column width algorithm seems to resolve the issue, as far as the X11 interface itself is concerned. The last column of a line is deemed to extend to the right margin, and does not extend the width of that same column in other lines.

I have confirmed that a tabified extended command list displays correctly with a proportional font. But I have reverted the change of NetHack.font_menu. Tabifying the menus will affect the Qt and win32 ports. I will leave that for another pull request.

This pull request, as it now stands, should have no obvious effect on the X11 interface unless you change font_menu to a proportional font, whether in NetHack.ad or in .nethackrc.

Is it intentional that the inventory and stats block in the character reroll window are indented? I'm not saying it's necessarily bad, just different from what it was before.

I've done the before and after on that menu and I see what you mean. No, it isn't intentional. But there are cases where we would want to indent a line without a selector; say, in the options menu, which displays options that can't be selected. I would need to know which lines should be indented.

This is in the pipeline.

Closing this; the changes are in the mainline now.