Re: [dev] [surf] next release

2009/10/21 Peter John Hartman <peterjohnhartman_AT_gmail.com>:
>
>
> On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Anselm R Garbe wrote:
>
>> 2009/10/21 Peter John Hartman <peterjohnhartman_AT_gmail.com>:
>>>
>>> (1) * removing urlbar/searchbar and using dmenu instead
>>>
>>> I'm not sure if this is so attractive, since dmenu does not support x
>>> paste
>>> (without a patch) and one always finds oneself (or at least I do) cutting
>>> and pasting into the searchbar.  The ultimate solution, it seems to me,
>>> is
>>> to have dmenu support x paste in vanilla.  This strikes me as superior to
>>> an
>>> "in-surf" solution (which uses GtkWhatever) for a number of reasons.
>>>        (a) It keeps the code simple (on the surf side that is; dmenu will
>>> need
>>>        to change).
>>>        (b) Other web-based activities (smart prefixes in particular)
>>>        could benefit from a dmenu + x paste.  For example, I have a
>>>        surf-googlesearch.sh script which runs dmenu after parsing my user
>>> input
>>>        from dmenu.  It would be nice to x paste into the dmenu rather
>>> than
>>>        typing out a given google search (e.g.  when one is searching
>>> someone's
>>>        odd name.)
>>>        (c) In general, I like the xprop interface and allowing
>>> applications
>>> other
>>>        than surf to interact with surf (which is what your new _SURF_FIND
>>> feature
>>>        allows--which is great--which is why we need dmenu to get
>>> patched!)
>>
>> There is sselp(1) at http://tools.suckless.org/sselp which reads
>> current selection and prints it to stdout, hence enables you to
>> integrate it into dmenu's cache or calling surf `sselp` directly.
>> There shouldn't be a real need to paste something interactively into
>> surf or dmenu really.
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> Anselm
>>
>
> What about cases in which one wishes to both type a few words and then
> paste?  For example, when I want
> to do a smart prefix search (via dmenu) on Bob McCrue (who sits in my
> selection buffer) but I also
> want to do something like "University of Wherever" + "Bob McCrue" where the
> first part is something
> I type in by hand and the second part is something I want to just "paste"
> in?   The same argument
> could be launched with respect to the find feature (which now utilizes
> dmenu).
>
> Or maybe you have something else in mind when you talk of "integrating into
> dmenu's cache"?

If you use dmenu for querying wikipedia, asking google, or whatever I
think all you want is a usual prefix and then type in the rest of your
query. I agree that dmenu's text editing is limited and not equally
powerful to a usual text edit field. But perhaps this proves to be an
advantage when used for a while, let's see what we think after using
it for some time. Often we might conclude less is more.

Kind regards,
Anselm
Received on Wed Oct 21 2009 - 14:29:55 UTC