On Thu, Nov 02, 2006 at 10:50:52PM +0100, Denis Grelich wrote: > > What would be the advantage of a C replacement? A cleaner code? > > Frankly I don't mind if wmiirc is not a masterpiece, so long as it > > works. A 0.017 second faster wmiirc? Idem, I really don't care about > > such speed optimizations, saving 1K RAM seems so pointless to me... As > > for the "more powerful scripting language", do I seriously need > > Python/Ruby/whatever to make the statusbar show me the volume or the > > currently played song? > > Just as a sidenote: the performance increase would be perceptible. I > can't find the link atm, but someone did benchmark this and found > pretty high differences for different implementations, two-digit > magnitudes.
What I learned from dwm development, and which encouraged me to develop dwm is, that it does not provides a 9P interface, because I think a 9P interface is too exeggerated for the purpose of a window manager. To keep the same flexibility but with a much simplier approach, you could think about defining a command interface which is read from stdin and special results written to stdout. This way, one could wrap wmii in a script, whereas /event is simply stdout, and all commands are written to stdin. This way, you could drop all the complexity and gain a rather simple interface to interact and extend the window manager. In dwm all input is displayed as status text, and there is no plan to extend this. But if you really want to simplify, I'd really consider dropping the 9P interface. There are reasons why a 9P interface makes sense for different tasks than managing windows, but in a window manager I really doubt its usefulness. Especially because much stuff in current hg tip has been simplified by Kris to commands which are written to specifc ctl files (eg. for setting colors and such stuff). Writing to stdin and reading from stdout using fifos does not need many additional processes, especially no atomic ixpc (==wmiir in the past), you can simply use the redirections of the shell. My idea is rather radical how I'd control wmii-future from a script: just drop the wmiirc script and put that stuff into the wmii script which should be user-supplied, this produces lesser clunk and is still easy. Just some thoughts... Regards, -- Anselm R. Garbe >< http://suckless.org/~arg/ >< GPG key: 0D73F361
