Re: [dwm] xicon - dzen-like tool for icons (2)

On Sun, 1 Jul 2007 16:13:32 +0200
pancake <pancake_AT_youterm.com> wrote:

> > > Why, o why, inventing yet another image format. What's wrong with
> > > X11's (de facto) native pixmap format, XPM (_X_ Pixmap)? There
> > > are already a sea of tools to handle it, it's an ASCII format and
> > > is simple enough too. X11 even comes with a library for easy
> > > usage of the format.
>
> For different reasons:
> - I was bored
> - I want a one line format
> - I want an ascii-art friendly format
> - I want a simple 1bit format
> - This is a one-night-hack (R)
>
> XPM is fine for static compilations, so, for hardcoding images, but
> not for parsing it on the wild.
>
> There's another format called xfig used by sylpheed and (maybe) other
> clients. This format is also 1 bit depth and it's 'standard'.
>
> In reality 1 bit images are cool, but maybe would be good to support
> palettes or with 4 or 8bpp. So a standard format like XPM would be
> good to support.
>
> I think that there'r two XPM formats a binary and a ascii (c-style
> like) one, and it works using a palette. So you'll be able to draw in
> Gimp instead of Vim :)
>
> BTW vim supports xpm too and represents in ansi the colors of the
> palette on the fly. That's cool too.
>
> At the moment it only handles 16x16x1 images, so xpm is not currently
> supported. But I would like to cleanup this horrible piece of code and
> start thinking on how to make it better and give't support to multiple
> colors.
>
> I was thinking in something like:
>
> pal:0030a830b9200a
> img:55300abb33191703749169ab9c639d47f
>
> When reading this formatted lines interpret them from stdin, so it
> could be possible to rotate paletes instead of changing pixmaps
> (common oldstyle demoscene tricks heh)
>
> The resolution or the depth is not reflected here, so we can use the
> size of the palette to get the depth and the size of the image to get
> a fixed NxN image resolution.
>
> Do you have another idea about how to implement this?

I already had this as a patch to wmii-2-something, using XPM. One could
simply cat the XPM file into a virtual file and display icons in the
bar that way (instead of just writing a text or a number (meters
existed back then)).
Received on Sun Jul 01 2007 - 17:02:42 UTC