Re: [hackers] [dmenu][RFC][PATCH 0/4] Using sort and simple C program to get dmenu history functionality

From: Silvan Jegen <s.jegen_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2015 15:28:42 +0100

Heyho!

On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 11:25 PM, Hiltjo Posthuma
<hiltjo_AT_codemadness.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 7:38 PM, Silvan Jegen <s.jegen_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>> Heyhey
>>
>> I kept thinking about a more general way to implement history
>> functionality for dmenu and this is what I came up with.
>>
>> We use the sort command to generate an input list for dmenu sorted by
>> count (first patch). dmenu itself is not modified and shows the available
>> commands with the most often used ones first (due to the sorting done
>> by sort). Before sending the dmenu output to a shell we use a simple
>> C program that reads a command from stdin for which it increments the
>> usage count in the history file before sending the command to the shell
>> to execute (patch 4; rest of the patches are just glue code).
>>
>
> This can be implemented in a few lines of shell (wc, sort) and maybe awk.

I *have* implemented the history part with sort. If you think the
history updating functionality that I ended up writing in C can be
(easily?) implemented in some shell script and/or awk then I would
like to see it on the list :)

I thought it should be possible to implement in awk but because you
have to both read input from stdin (the command) and from a file (the
history file) I couldn't figure it out in the admittedly short time I
kept trying to do it.

I tried abusing the -v option of gawk to set the command name as a
variable value but that only seems to work in a BEGIN block which is
executed before the input file is read. It may be possible to use the
shell to read the command and then initialize a variable in the awk
code given on the command line but I think the argument-escaping hell
would be very annoying to deal with.


>> * It uses the -t and -k options of sort which are not available for
>> all sort implementations (not in sbase for example). If there is an
>> easy way to replicate this functionality without using these sort
>> options I would like to hear about it.
>
> Sbase sort supports -t and -k, if some part of it is broken: send a patch.

You are right. I must have checked an old sbase version. I will test
the patch with sbase sort as soon as I find the time.


Cheers,

Silvan
Received on Mon Nov 30 2015 - 15:28:42 CET