Re: [dev] uzbl

On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 08:48:28PM +0200, Dieter Plaetinck wrote:
>> No, it doesn't. I'd be in favor of it, but it would require
>> switching over to xulrunner and breaking compatibility with
>> other extensions (some of which are too useful to give up).
>
>did you mean switching away from xulrunner? firefox (and hence
>vimperator) use xulrunner, no?
>May I ask which FF extensions you like so much?

Yes, Firefox uses xulrunner, but it's a xulrunner app in and of
itself. The other option is to run directly on xulrunner,
without all of Firefox's trappings, and thus have more control
over its inner workings.

As for the extensions, it's not so much that I like them as that
I need them. I occasionally have to do web development work, and
there's no way I'm giving up Firebug, for instance. I also tend
to miss Adblock a lot when it's gone (but webkit has a
counterpart). Something akin to NoScript would be nice, but I
hate that heap of crap. Every time I've tried to take apart its
internals to make it usable, I've given up in anger. Other than
that, I've replaced most of my extensions with either Vimperator
scripts, or additions to Vimperator itself.

>did you mean wmii9menu ? I'm also a wmii user but I have no wimenu on
>my system. I prefer dmenu since you can control it with the keyboard.
>(in fact I prefer dmenu-vertical, a patched version from someone on the
>arch forums. screenie: (the top menu)
>http://www.uzbl.org/img/screenshot-2.png)

No, I mean wimenu (bundled with wmii). It's like dmenu but, in
my opinion, better.

>>
>> You probably are.
>
>Please enlighten me then :) What does vimperator do more then providing
>a vimlike interface?

Well, don't get me started on the vim-like interface. There's
this edict that we have to stay “mostly” vim compatible, which
means a bunch of muddled inconsistent interfaces imported from
vim and some vim-like keys that do something completely
different than your fingers are programmed to recall. But, I
digress...

 From my perspective, other than a fairly usable interface,
vimperator is pretty much just a framework to make my browser do
what I want. I've been doing what I can to untangle the codebase
into a bunch of modular APIs that don't really care what you do
with them. At this point, I pretty routinely write plugins in a
few lines of code, in a single file, that do the work of massive
Firefox extensions. At any rate, Vimperator doesn't really
get along well with Firefox. We more or less fight it tooth and
nail to try and be more vim- or Unix- line.

>In your other mail you specifically mentioned you are interested in
>integration with wmii. Well, me too :) I would like to hear your ideas.

Well, I don't have any concrete ideas, other than using wimenu
for the command line. I suspect that once I've used it for a
while, though, I'll want some application specific window
management logic. I think I'd be likely to use a group of tags
instead of a single tag with multiple windows with multiple
tabs.

Sorry for any rambling. I haven't slept.

-- 
Kris Maglione
It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of
giants standing on the shoulders of other giants.  It has also been
said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on
the toes of other midgets.
	--Alan Cooper