wmiirc-lua v0.1.1

Last night, just before midnight, I released v0.1 of wmiirc-lua. And then a few minutes later I had to release v0.1.1. Let this be a lesson to me, midnight is way too late to make releases.

So what do you get in v0.1.1?

• a very fast and lean implementation of an event loop for wmii-3.5
• all keyboard shortcuts from the (shell) wmiirc that ships with wmii-3.5
• some ideas taken from wmii+ruby like more advanced keyboard shortcuts and plugins
• a clock plugin, a load plugin
• and most importantly a huge community of 3 users!

Why would you want to use wmiirc-lua over the default, or even over the fabulous wmii+ruby?

• unlike wmii+ruby, wmiirc-lua can run with wmii-3.5
  • debian/testing no longer has wmii-3.1 and according to the wmii website: wmii-3.1 is deprecated
• wmiirc-lua is faster then the shell version because it doesn’t have to exec things on event processing
  • we communicate with wmii over an IXP socket directly
• wmiirc-lua will not eat your laptop’s battery life like ruby threading can
  • powertop used to show ruby as the #1 source of CPU wakeups
  • 300 wakeups/s with wmii+ruby and 1 wakeup/s with wmiirc-lua

wmiirc-lua has only been tested against the latest wmii and libixp, to get them do this…

    mkdir wmii-lua-build
    cd wmii-build

    hg clone http://suckless.org/hg.rc/libixp
    cd libixp
    make 
    sudo make install
    cd ..

    hg clone http://suckless.org/hg.rc/wmii
    cd wmii
    make 
    sudo make install
    cd ..

To build and install wmiirc-lua do this…

    apt-get install lua5.1 liblua5.1-0-dev liblua5.1-posix0 git-core

    git clone git://repo.or.cz/wmiirc-lua.git/
    cd wmiirc-lua

    make install

This will put all the files in ~/.wmii-3.5/. You still have to make your .xsession execute wmii-3.5.

If you do decide to try it, I would like to hear from you. Let me know what I should add to the TODO list to make your wmii experience even better.

There is now an #wmiirc-lua IRC channel on oftc.net.