Desktop on bartman's blog

mark-yank-urls: fix bug allowing shell to interpret the url

Sat, 30 May 2009 22:38:01 -0400

I committed a fix for an annoying bug in the urxvt [mark-yank-urls]{urxvt-url-yank} script.

This has been reported by several people. I have finally fixed it, but the credit should go to Hans Dieter Pearcey, Daniel Danner and Olof Johansson for reporting it.

wmiirc-lua v0.2.8 release

Sat, 09 May 2009 21:26:48 -0400

I’ve packaged up the recent changes made to [wmiirc-lua]{tag/wmiirc-lua} and released a new version.

This release is mostly about bug fixes, and moving things around. Particularly, I’ve [moved the project to github]{wmiirc-lua-github}, and also the new configuration files live in ~/.wmii-lua not ~/.wmii-3.5 (which clearly didn’t make sense).

There are many fixes to the packaging and startup scripts to make things more robust. I’ve also revisited and fixed building Debian packages (at least for Debian/Lenny).

If you’ve used the [kitchen sink]{wmiirc-lua-kitchen-sink} repository you should note that this repository is being deprecated in favour of storing the wmii and libixp repositories as submodules of wmii-lua – so no need for a container repo like the kitchen sink.

wmiirc-lua moving to github

Sat, 09 May 2009 11:31:25 -0400

I had as surge of new interest in wmii-lua in the last couple of months. I thought it would be good to officially state here that I’ve been moving the wmii-lua git repositories to github.

android true type font

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:49:42 -0400

Following a random tweet on identi.ca I upgraded my proprotional fonts on Debian/Sqeeze to ttf-droid.

I expect that some day this font will be packaged by Debian, but for now I had to:

    wget 'http://launchpadlibrarian.net/21202254/ttf-droid_1.00%7Eb112%2Bdfsg-0ubuntu1_all.deb'
    sudo dpkg -i ttf-droid_1.00\~b112+dfsg-0ubuntu1_all.deb

Because I am a big console junkie I don’t use proprtional fonts much, but they do look nice on the web.

wmiirc-lua v0.2.5 release

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:51:21 -0400

A kind [wmiirc-lua]{tag/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.

wmiirc-lua v0.2.4 release

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 11:23:45 -0400

I packaged up the latest modules and bug fixes of [wmiirc-lua]{tag/wmiirc-lua} and made a v0.2.4 release.

wmiirc-lua updates

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:44:47 -0400

I finally got around to [porting a few old features]{20070112131252} to [wmiirc-lua]{tag/wmiirc-lua}.

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

four steps to reproducible Debian installs

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 14:34:29 -0400

For ever now some friends and I have been talking about making essential packages, which would pull in all the tools that we often use on Debian. So here goes…

With the power of the equivs package, this is actually a very short procedure.

wmiirc-lua kitchen sink repository

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:10:37 -0500

[wmiirc-lua]{tag/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]{tag/git} powers; or more specifically git submodules. To follow along you will need git 1.5.3 or newer.

wmiirc-lua v0.2.1 remembers a bit more

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 23:42:32 -0500

[wmiirc-lua]{tags/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.

wmiirc-lua v0.2 has suspend and raw modes

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 20:53:36 -0400

[wmiirc-lua]{tags/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]{wmiirc-in-lua-v0.1.1}.

wmiirc-lua debianization

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 11:23:45 -0400

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]{wmiirc-in-lua-v0.1.1} 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.

wmiirc-lua v0.1.1

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 09:42:13 -0400

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 in lua

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 00:07:36 -0400

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.

forwarding ssh and X through screen

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 10:57:46 -0400

I have an update to my [previous article]{screen-ssh-agent} on forwarding [ssh-agent]{tag/ssh} through [screen]{tag/screen}. I’ve since switched to [zsh]{tag/zsh} and am now forwarding the X DISPLAY environment variable through to the screen shell.

You can grab my ~/.zsh.d/S51_screen, ~/.zsh.d/S60_prompt, and ~/.screenrc or read below.

urxvt mouseless url yanking

Thu, 03 May 2007 01:35:55 -0400

In the quest for a completely mouse free desktop, I wanted to be able to yank URLs from the termial without using the mouse. This happens often enough in IRC when I would want to grab the most recent URL and run it in firefox.

I talked to the author of vimperator and he suggested that I look at urxvt (packaged as rxvt-unicode). So I did.

A few hours later and I have a perl plug-in for urxvt that does just want I wanted.

mouse-free

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 20:25:45 -0400

First there was a Navigator, then there was an Explorer. Later it was time for a Konqueror. Now it’s time for an Imperator, the VIMperator :)

VIMperator is a mozilla/firefox plugin from Martin Stubenschrott. It completely redefines the firefox interface to mimic the beloved VIM editor.

If you love vim, you are likely to love VIMperator. If not… well, your loss.

wmii+ruby xlock action

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 11:19:17 -0500

I use xscreensaver and like to lock my display when I leave my computer. Here is a snippet from my wmiirc-config.rb file that adds an xlock action to the Alt-a action menu.

    plugin_config["standard:actions"]["internal"].update({
      'xlock' => lambda do |wmii, *args|
            system("xscreensaver-command --lock")
      end
    })

I start my xscreensaver in the .xsession file:

    /usr/bin/xscreensaver -nosplash &

… before launching wmii.

cloning xterms in wmii+ruby

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 13:12:52 -0500

I have recently added a few things to by wmii+ruby configuration that I wanted to share. These are:

start a program in a given view from bash prompt (authored by Dave O’Neill)
start a program in a given view using Alt-Shift-p (authored by Jean Richard)
start an xterm in a given view using Alt-Shift-Return
cache directory changes in a view, start an xterm in the view’s last directory using Alt-Apostrophe

wmii+ruby talk for OCLUG

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 01:05:51 -0500

I am giving a quick overview of wmii+ruby later today.

In case anyone is interested here are the relevant links:

my presentation pdf, magic point
my wmiirc config

Links from presentation:

wmii official site
wmii+ruby official site
[my blog entries on wmii]{tag/wmii}

wmii w/ ruby wmiirc

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 21:33:06 -0400

My window managers have changed a few times over the years. I started off with OpenSTEP at Carleton, used that for a year. Then switched to Afterstep, which I used for about 3 years. Next I switched to sawfish/sawmill, and used it for about 4 years. Recently I went through a crisis as sawfish stopped working for me in testing on amd64. I found [ion3]{tag/ion3} to be a nice replacement. I was a happy ion3 user for almost a year and then someone suggested that I try [wmii-3]{tag/wmii}.

small fonts

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 20:19:07 -0400

I don’t use a lot of X applications. The one that I use most often is xterm.

I like small fonts, and I find that I have no problem reading a small font on an LCD monitor. Recently someone mentioned the Terminus font. I tried it and it quickly became my favored xterm font… it’s so tiny and clean! Here are the important bits of my .Xdefaults file…

    XTerm*renderFont:        false
    XTerm*font:              -xos4-terminus-medium-r-normal-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

I also grabbed a few tiny fonts from Proggy Fonts and my new wmii font is ProggyTiny. Here is the bit from my .wmii-3/wmiirc-config.rb file…

    font        '-windows-proggytiny-medium-r-normal--10-80-96-96-c-60-iso8859-1'

The above font site also taught me how to import fonts into X font server w/o a restart and how to keep fonts in my home directory. Check out this short HOWTO.

firefox crashes with form input

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 08:34:56 -0400

I ran into a strange bug with firefox locking up each time I pushed a form submit button. When I ran it from the console I had an endless stream of:

    mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent()
    mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent()
    mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent()
    mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent()
    mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent()
    mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent()
    mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent()
    mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent()

Googling for it revealed an intresting thread which dates this bug to firefox 1.0. Grr.

ion3 greatness and acting on X selections

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 21:17:16 -0400

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…

sawfish workspace themes

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 13:01:46 -0500

(Don't get too excited... it may not be what you think)

I have been using sawfish for many years now, and written a few custom hacks for it. My current theme is Tlines. I've tried most the other window managers and come back to sawfish every time I get adventurous, because sawfish is so bloody configurable.

Recently I started using the following settings, as a very cool time saver:

focus = enter-only
root-window binding 'button1-click2' locks my screen
root-window binding 'w' start galeon
root-window binding 't' start 3 vertical non-overlapping terminals
root-window binding 'g' start gimp + gqview (also non-overlapping)