Re: [dev] [hack] Having dmenu provide hints about current selected entry

On 26 November 2010 15:43, Connor Lane Smith <cls_AT_lubutu.com> wrote:
> On 26 November 2010 14:04, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter_AT_plaetinck.be> wrote:
>> I would prefer if it works like this:
>> - when you invoke dmenu, it immediately appears, and user can start
>> typing input. as soon as dmenu is started, it starts reading stdin,
>> however fast or slow it goes until EOF.
>> - anytime anything happens (user changes his query or new line is
>>  read on stdin) the search results are updated in realtime accordingly.
>>
>> I think the code/algorithms to realize this must be pretty complicated
>> for it to work nicely (high performance).. But your patches seem
>> trivial, so did I miss something?
>
> No, to do this would be trivial. It's just that certain suckless
> people are rather aggressive to the idea of using pthreads for
> anything.

Well the question is if the bottleneck is the input writer or dmenu
reading the input. The problems I remember from the past where all
related to the input writer (for example dmenu_path taking some time
to create it's output) but not dmenu creating the input item list. If
the latter is a problem now I would like to hear how many input items
are read and what the time penalty is to process them in dmenu, before
considering putting the read into a worker thread.

Cheers,
Anselm
Received on Fri Nov 26 2010 - 16:27:10 CET