Re: Run Prompt Rewrite Ideas
On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Frank Blendingerf...@intoxicatedmind.net
wrote:
Hi.
On Wed 2009-06-10 10:05, Andrei Thorp gar...@gmail.com proclaimed:
Just to throw in another idea: let's have something like dmenu[1] in
awesome. I guess most of you know dmenu, for those who don't: it is a
standalone multi-purpose bar, used originally in dwm, but often also
together with other tiled WMs like XMonad or awesome. It is actually
quite the opposite of something like Gnome-do, it is very simplistic -
you just provide a list of input lines on stdin, and receive the user
selection on stdout.
I don't really see the purpose of using dmenu with awesome since
awesome's panels support pretty much everything that dmenu does
(including getting stuff from console via awesome-client). Our panels
are _more_ powerful if anything.
Could could give me some hints on how to achieve dmenu-like behaviour?
I admit I have never actually tried to get it done with awesome's
prompts, as dmenu just worked out of the box.
I would like a full width bar, split into input area and available
items. This would probably best done by creating a floating wibox that
is positioned right over the main statusbar, with a prompt widget and a
textbox widget. So no problem so far.
Sure I guess, I'll explain how this could roughly be done.
a) If you want a floating wibox positioned wherever, you'd probably
want some code like this in your wibox creation loop (this can be done
for all screens):
runwibox = {}
(loop starts)
(some other code)
-- Run Wibox
runwibox[s] = awful.wibox({
position = float,
fg = beautiful.fg_normal,
bg = beautiful.bg_normal,
border_width = 1,
border_color = beautiful.bg_focus,
screen = s
})
runwibox[s]:geometry({
width = screen[s].geometry.width * 0.6,
height = 22,
x = screen[s].geometry.x + screen[s].geometry.width * 0.2,
y = screen[s].geometry.y + screen[s].geometry.height - 22,
})
runwibox[s].opacity = 0.7
runwibox[s].visible = false
runwibox[s].ontop = true
-- Widgets for prompt wibox
runwibox[s].widgets = {
mypromptbox[s],
}
(loop ends)
b) You want to make some widgets up top, probably text areas, but
images and buttons and whatever you want are also possible with
awesome:
-- External scripts change this
random_text = widget({
type = textbox,
name = random_text,
align = right
})
random_text.text =
-- This code would probably go above the wibox creation, with your
other widgets code
c) Remember to add the random_text widget to your new floating wibox
d) When you want to change the text of the random_text widget from
outside awesome (ie. with bash scripts), use:
Longbow.garoth ~: echo 'random_text.text = foo bar' | awesome-client
e) To see the value, use:
Longbow.garoth ~: echo return random_text.text | awesome-client
string foo bar
END OF DEMO
Anyway, so you hopefully get the idea of what I'm doing here. You make
a wibox with whatever widgets you want, and then you can modify the
text of them later, externally, using awesome-client. Awesome-client
can do any lua code, so it's _very_ powerful and really only limited
by your imagination. You can probably make automatically generated
menus, popups, changing images, etc. If you want more text widgets,
make more. It's simple.
However, yeah, narrowing search is one of those things that would be
good to have for our run prompt rewrite.
This is actually the best thing about dmenu, and I guess it would be
quite a lot of work that has to be done to achieve that. A key handler
would have to update the item list on every key press, both to narrow
down the list and for a selection/scrolling support as dmenu has it.
Is that (currently) doable in Lua? Or would it need work in the C core?
It seems like all the infrastructure is in place, we have a robust
keygrabber and the run system itself is pretty good as it is. Would
take more work of course.
Cheers,
-AT
--
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Run Prompt Rewrite Ideas
Hello there, So we were talking yesterday about the Run prompt. In general, it's a nice thing, nothing really to complain about. It does tab completion and history, and that's cool. But have you guys ever tried something like gnome-do or other run prompts for Linux? They've come up with a whole lot of cool features. Examples: - Remembering which programs you run most so to offer completion faster and more accurately - Handling mime-types -- so just typing in a txt file might be hooked to open a terminal with vim - Generic handlers -- typing some special command might trigger an awesome action - Mail handlers -- Typing in a mail address could be tab-completed against some file (often integrates with evolution/thunderbird, but I guess most of us would use something else). Then pressing enter on a mail address could open up a compose window in your favourite mail program, be it Mutt, GMail, Sup, Pine, etc. - SSH handlers -- Some people have written separate prompts for this fairly well -- type one of the hosts in your ssh file for completions and it opens your term + ssh there Partial credit to anrxc for ideas. He also said something like, Would be cool to make the run prompt one of the killer features of Awesome that now people can't live without -- like Naughty.. I tend to agree, we could do something spectacular here. Something that comes to mind here also is that most of the features I've mentioned above can actually be done with the current system by making several different prompts that handle things differently and then pressing that specific bind. This is okay, but it means you need like 6 different binds rather than a smart system. I'm sure the code that we have now is reusable to some degree though. Anyway, so of course me being Garoth the lazy whimp, I don't really plan to do an undertaking of this magnitude at the moment. I'm not even suggesting someone should take it, but I think it's worth putting ideas out there in case someone is indeed intrigued. Cheers! -Andrei Garoth Thorp -- To unsubscribe, send mail to awesome-devel-unsubscr...@naquadah.org.
Re: Run Prompt Rewrite Ideas
At 1244633771 time_t, Andrei Thorp wrote: Partial credit to anrxc for ideas. He also said something like, Would be cool to make the run prompt one of the killer features of Awesome that now people can't live without -- like Naughty.. I tend to agree, we could do something spectacular here. I agree, everything is ready to write such a thing. But that's a big nice work to do. I'll be glad to provide insights to anyone wanting to work on this, as usual. Something that comes to mind here also is that most of the features I've mentioned above can actually be done with the current system by making several different prompts that handle things differently and then pressing that specific bind. This is okay, but it means you need like 6 different binds rather than a smart system. I'm sure the code that we have now is reusable to some degree though. awful's prompt stuff is easily reusable. Anybody can write a new module to write something GNOME Do style. Cheers, -- Julien Danjou // ᐰ jul...@danjou.info http://julien.danjou.info // 9A0D 5FD9 EB42 22F6 8974 C95C A462 B51E C2FE E5CD // Trust no one. signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Run Prompt Rewrite Ideas
Hi. On Wed 2009-06-10 04:36, Andrei Thorp gar...@gmail.com proclaimed: So we were talking yesterday about the Run prompt. In general, it's a nice thing, nothing really to complain about. It does tab completion and history, and that's cool. [...] Partial credit to anrxc for ideas. He also said something like, Would be cool to make the run prompt one of the killer features of Awesome that now people can't live without -- like Naughty.. I tend to agree, we could do something spectacular here. Just to throw in another idea: let's have something like dmenu[1] in awesome. I guess most of you know dmenu, for those who don't: it is a standalone multi-purpose bar, used originally in dwm, but often also together with other tiled WMs like XMonad or awesome. It is actually quite the opposite of something like Gnome-do, it is very simplistic - you just provide a list of input lines on stdin, and receive the user selection on stdout. The reasons I like it and use it together with awesome are: - It is not a tiny prompt somewhere in a cluttered bar, but occupies the whole screen width, hiding the awesome bar underneath it. This gives place to show the available items on the right side, and you have no distraction. - vim-like keybindings - It does the selection of the items by a substring search, narrowing the matching items down in real time. And it does this fucking fast. I also find this to be more convenient and easier then the front-part completion + tabbing that you usually have, like in the current awesome prompt or in most shells. What I don't like that much, is: - I have to spawn a process every time. It is very fast and has a small memory footprint, but nevertheless, having it in Lua would let me sleep better at night. ;-) - The whole integration into awesome is sort of hackish. One example for that is that I had to patch dmenu to support x/y offsets, so I could use the screen paddings I have set in awesome on my media player machine (I need the padding to compensate overscan there). - The fonts. While awesome uses fonts like Terminus 12 (Xft?), dmenu uses those -*-terminus-*-*-...-12-...-*-* fonts, whatever those are called. I don't have a clue about fonts under X, but those two systems have different fonts available - at least on my machines, which make it impossible for me to have the same font on the awesome status bar and on my dmenu bars. This clearly sucks. Greetings, Frank [1] http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu -- Frank Blendinger | fb(at)intoxicatedmind.net | GPG: 0x0BF2FE7A Fingerprint: BB64 F2B8 DFD8 BF90 0F2E 892B 72CF 7A41 0BF2 FE7A signature.asc Description: Digital signature
