Bart's Blog

A kind wmiirc-lua user, Sytse Wielinga (sytse on irc), had debugged an old issue in luaixp code I had written for wmiirc-lua.

While this bug directly addresses raw mode (Mod4-space), I belive that this will fix a bunch of weird issues so I released v0.2.5. Since v0.2.4 there was also a small bug in the battery plugin that was fixed.

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I packaged up the latest modules and bug fixes of wmiirc-lua and made a v0.2.4 release.

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I finally got around to porting a few old features to wmiirc-lua.

There is now a mailing list for wmiirc-lua. Subscribe by emailing wmii-lua-subscribe@googlegroups.com.

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wmiirc-lua is a replacement for sh-based wmiirc that ships with the wmii window manager.

I have had some issues with the libixp and wmii packages under Debian. Particularly the problem is caused by the fact that libixp (and wmii use of the library) changes often but do not have any way to detect subtle changes in the API from the sources.

I decided to track everything in a kitchen sink repository that will include all the sources that need to be versioned and released together. That way what you try is the same thing I tried. Currently this includes

• libixp imported from mercurial
• wmii imported from mercurial
• wmiirc-lua

This of course uses magic git powers; or more specifically git submodules. To follow along you will need git 1.5.3 or newer.

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wmiirc-lua is a replacement for sh-based wmiirc that ships with the wmii window manager.

In version 0.2.1 wmii will remember the last few programs that have been ran and the last few actions taken. It will put those entries at the beginning of the completion list. Frequent items can thus be selected with arrow keys and pushing enter.

In this release selecting works spaces with Mod4-[a-z] will not select the first view that starts with that letter, but rather the most recently used view that starts with the letter.

There have also been a few bug fixes, notably the core will now look in ~/.wmii-3.5 for plugins and core libraries before looking in system directories. That will solve the problem of someone using make install-user while having an older .deb installed.

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wmiirc-lua is a replacement for sh-based wmiirc that ships with the wmii window manager.

The big improvement in version 0.2 is the client tracking support; this enables raw and suspend modes...

• in raw mode the wmii key-bindings are ignored and all input is passed to the application.

• in suspend mode, the process that created a particular window will be sent the STOP signal when the window is not in focus. I wrote this with firefox in mind; even when idle and off-screen my firefox gets woken up 100 times per second.

There were also several bug fixes in this release. You will still need to build libixp and wmii from hg as detained here.

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I just fixed the install scripts for wmiirc-lua. It is now possible to install wmiirc-lua in system directories and run from there. There is also a Wmii-lua session for the display managers (kdm, gdm, etc).

The new and improved way to install wmiirc-lua is to get libixp and wmii from hg and then...

    sudo 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
    git checkout debian
    make deb

    sudo debi

    install-wmiirc-lua

... restart X, and select Wmii-lua as your login session.

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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

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I have been running wmii window manager for almost a year, and since the beginning I have been using the ruby wmiirc script.

In wmii all events are handled by the wmiirc script, while wmii handles the display of windows. The wmiirc should thus do nothing until a user event (or a program event) occurs. Well, it turns out that updating the clock and status widgets requires that a thread be ran to write the new text to the screen.

So far, that's not so bad. We could schedule updates to occur infrequently. The bad part comes from the ruby implementation of threads. Threads in ruby 1.x seem to require that the interpreter do a busy wait at an interval of 10ms... this does not make me very happy as it chews up a ton of battery life according to powertop.

I wanted to rewrite a wmiirc in something else. That something else, I decided, would be lua. I chose lua because of the small footprint, use of coroutines and iterators to avoid threading, and the fact that I can plug things in using C.

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