So it turns out that I have not blogged about [ion3]{tag/ion3} yet. I’ve been using ion3 as my window manager for about half a year, and I still love it. It’s fast, does not requrie a mouse for most tasks, and has very powerful scripting and keyboard binding capabilities. But enough about the greatness of ion3… and onto the rest of the story…

For some time I wanted to have a magic key binding that would do something – anything – with my X selection. Say, I highlight a URL and push this magic key, it should display it in a new browser tab. If I highlight what looks to be a valid file, it should launch gvim on it, etc. I previously tried with sawfish, but I suffer from a serious condition that causes me to vomit when I look at lisp-like languages – one of the reasons I abandoned emacs years ago.

It was pretty easy in ion. Below is my [lua]{tag/lua} code to implement what I described…

function exists(n) local f = assert(io.open(n, “r”)) io.close(f) return not (f==nil) end

function my_url_handler (ws)
    ioncore.request_selection(
        -- this is an anonymous function that is called with the selected text
        function (str)  
            if (string.find(str, "http://") ~= nil) then
                ioncore.exec_on (ws, "firefox -new-tab " .. string.shell_safe(str))
            elseif (exists(str)) then
                -- my vim is compiled from source and not in the PATH available to lua
                ioncore.exec_on (ws, "/usr/local/bin/gvim " .. safe)
            end
        end)
end

defbindings("WScreen", { 
    kpress("Mod4+U", "my_url_handler(_)"),
})

You can just throw this into your ~/.ion3/cfg_user.lua file and restart ion. Then highlight something, pressh Win+U and voila!

The plan is to extend this function to trigger on other kinds or strings.

Here are some links:

update⌗

Another cool use of this is improved mouse-less operations with xclip…

xclip - command line interface to X selections

I can now get strings out of cli output and act on them with a lua script in ion3.