Here's my specific problem: I installed Slackware which put LiLo in my mbr and, of course, all my other distro's went away. Things didn't work how I liked but, like a good boy, I had backed up my mbr and put everything back the way it was.

I want to be able to put the slack installation into my grub menu so I can play with it while still having working distros. There is nothing like an initrd in slackware as far as I can tell and the lilo.conf doesn't translate to grub.conf, at least not to me.

My general problem is that I often want to add things to my grub menu and editing the text files is too difficult for me.

Is there a gui, or at least a menu driven app which makes this easier? I know the ubuntu installer does a nice job of gathering all the distros together, but I don't want to go through all that...

So, you want "automatic" or ... a menu driven app
- which you still would need to tell which part or file is which and belongs to where...
you still need to have some control over such an automatic solution (configuring it for example) which in turn would need some interaction on your part.

There is no automatic solution I'm aware of.

To understand better what the problem is to you:

how is
writing the information (which you have to have) to a text file
different from
doing clicks to do essentially the same in a menu driven app?

In both cases you still have to gather the info yourself, manually.
The only difference is between "writing" and "clicking".

You needn't learn "vi" or "nano" if that is what scares you - it can be any text editor you are comfortable with in you GUI environment - such as the standard editor in Gnome or KDE.
And the syntax of the grub configuration file is fairly simple.

Is it the syntax you don't understand?

What did you find difficult to add a new distros to you're menu.lst ?
As stated before you can use nano or pico for it .
You even can use kwrite to do the trick.
It works as , as long as you use a real linux text editor
There are many ways to to chain loading .
One way is

root (hd?,?) ? depending on the drive and partition
title linux X
configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst (the menu.lst of the distro you are adding )

so if are using nano nano /boot/grub/menu.st (menu.lst from the distro you are booting from)

The problem is not editing a text file, but knowing what to put where. The lilo.conf file has places for:

image
root
label

But nothing for initrd! Do I need to make an initrd? How did slackware boot from lilo without one?

The reason I want an automatic, or semiautomatic solution is that I am often tweaking grub and every problem is different. The ubuntu installer says "Hey, I found these other OS's. Do you want them available at boot?" and then it does it. I vacillate between wanting to be a good linux learner and doing it the hard way, and just wanting it done...

Maybe Slackware does not use an initrd - I've never used Slackware and I'm not familiar anymore with lilo and how to tell it to use one - it surely is possible.

grub's configuration has a similar structure:
first come:
default --> the section/kernel you want to boot by default
timeout --> in seconds, before the default is booted
optionally:
splashimage --> a background-image for the menu
root --> the partition where grub's files are. This is where the /boot directory is - in grub's notation:
it starts to count from 0 for harddisk/partition
(hd0,1) for example means: first harddisk,second partition
next come as many sections as you need,each consisting of:
title --> the name you want to see in the menu
kernel --> the name of the file which is your kernel (often just vmlinuz - or your own name
followed, on the same line, by the options the kernel needs to know - such as where the filesystems / will be found and more
possibly a third line - if you use an initrd

Example of grub.conf, the sections separated by empty lines:
HTH

The automatic solution is : Smart Boot Manager.

With Grub or Lilo installed to super block ( the install partition ),
they can all be booted from the 'SmartBootManager' in MBR
( or on a floppy ( cdrom )).

I have 10..13 OS's on each hard disk, "SBM" in MBR, and never edit
Grub or Lilo. .. Will boot Linux, Windows, BSD's, cdrom(s), floppy.
Have used this solution for 5 years, always works perfect.

http://linux.simple.be/tools/sbm

http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/
> > sbminst → → example command : # ./sbminst -d /dev/sda
.....

if your grub will boot slack put this in the kernel line
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda? vga=normal ro
thats assuming you have an ide hardrive. otherwise install slack lilo to the slackware root partiton using the install disk and chainload from grub with the following:
rootnoverify (?,?)
chainloader +1