wmiirc in lua

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]{tag/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.

The beginning of this can be seen in my [git]{tag/git} repository.

• Git web interface provided by repo.or.cz:

  http://repo.or.cz/w/wmiirc-lua.git

• clone from the mirror:

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

• clone from my site:

  git clone git://www.jukie.net/wmiirc-lua.git/
  

It’s had about 5 minutes of testing so far, so I wish you luck :)

NOTES

This requires that you have a pretty recent version of wmii. I am running the tip of the wmii mercurial repository…

    hg clone http://suckless.org/hg.rc/libixp
    hg clone http://suckless.org/hg.rc/wmii

You will also need a bunch of lua packages; I installed them all …

    apt-cache search lua5.1 | awk '/liblua5.1/ { print $1 }' | xargs sudo apt-get install -y

… to be safe.