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

On 26 November 2010 16:43, Anselm R Garbe <garbeam_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> On 26 November 2010 16:33, Christophe-Marie Duquesne
> <chm.duquesne_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 3:04 PM, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter_AT_plaetinck.be> wrote:
>>> the delay caused by dmenu waiting for stdin input to be complete
>>> is noticeable.
>>
>> Actually, while performance also matters, the thread thing is not
>> primarily a matter of fast processing. It is just that if you wait for
>> the input to finish before allowing the user to interact, you miss the
>> point of allowing feeding additional entries to this input from the
>> suggestions (since these suggestions can only happen once user can
>> interact).
>
> Ok that's a better reason for it.
>
>> On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 3:43 PM, Connor Lane Smith <cls_AT_lubutu.com> wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> I was more or less aware of this but did not see any other options.
>> @Troels: I did not know select(), but I am going to read about it.
>>
>>> The first aspect of your patch, the incremental output, already
>>> exists.
>>
>> Thank you, I did not know about it.
>>
>>> The threaded input is neat, and I am perfectly willing to
>>> add it into dmenu proper. Though I expect others will not share that
>>> willingness.
>>
>> It isn't. I experimented a crash when messing with it, so expect to find bugs.
>
> I guess those crashes are related to concurrent accesses to the same
> data structure. In the end the thread would need to work on a copy and
> the items propagation would need to be protected by a mutex. Hence
> things will become a bit ugly.
>
> I don't think the select() approach would increase the readability a
> lot, but at least it would implicitly disallow concurrent accesses to
> items.
>
> I think overall the threaded version should be favored, for now as a
> patch I would say.

Also, I don't really see the usefulness in being able to type and
matching on a subset of items and at some point (when the worker
thread synchronises) the list of items becomes bigger out of the blue
(from a user perspective).

Cheers,
Anselm
Received on Fri Nov 26 2010 - 16:48:59 CET