keyboard based launcher app

[adante]

Here's the situation: I have a PVR with a remote control which detects as a USB keyboard (HID). I'd like a way to do run some basic commands (e.g. restart mythfrontend, restart the backend, shutdown the whole computer, launch firefox, turn off the screen, etc.) and possibly do some basic window management using the remote. Ideally I would press the power button on the remote (which generates a keypress of ctrl-alt-shift-meta-backspace or something insane which I can pickup via xhkeys), which would then launch this application which would provide some sort of menu interface using numbers and directional arrows (which I would need to rebind because for some insane reason the left/right on my remote generate shift pageup and shift pagedown keypresses) to let me execute my predefined commands.

I thought there would be some sort of software out there to let me do this but I can't for the life of me find it. Does anybody know of some? I know I could probably achieve the basic functionality by some insane use of recursive xhkeys and xosd, or fvwm, but I was hoping for a prettier solution that didn't involve *my* brainpower