Re: [wmii] Preparations for 3.5

On Thu, Nov 02, 2006 at 10:50:52PM +0100, Denis Grelich wrote:
> > What would be the advantage of a C replacement? A cleaner code?
> > Frankly I don't mind if wmiirc is not a masterpiece, so long as it
> > works. A 0.017 second faster wmiirc? Idem, I really don't care about
> > such speed optimizations, saving 1K RAM seems so pointless to me... As
> > for the "more powerful scripting language", do I seriously need
> > Python/Ruby/whatever to make the statusbar show me the volume or the
> > currently played song?
>
> Just as a sidenote: the performance increase would be perceptible. I
> can't find the link atm, but someone did benchmark this and found
> pretty high differences for different implementations, two-digit
> magnitudes.

What I learned from dwm development, and which encouraged me to
develop dwm is, that it does not provides a 9P interface,
because I think a 9P interface is too exeggerated for the
purpose of a window manager. To keep the same flexibility but
with a much simplier approach, you could think about defining a
command interface which is read from stdin and special results
written to stdout. This way, one could wrap wmii in a script,
whereas /event is simply stdout, and all commands are written to
stdin. This way, you could drop all the complexity and gain a
rather simple interface to interact and extend the window
manager. In dwm all input is displayed as status text, and there
is no plan to extend this. But if you really want to simplify,
I'd really consider dropping the 9P interface.

There are reasons why a 9P interface makes sense for different
tasks than managing windows, but in a window manager I really
doubt its usefulness. Especially because much stuff in current
hg tip has been simplified by Kris to commands which are written
to specifc ctl files (eg. for setting colors and such stuff).

Writing to stdin and reading from stdout using fifos does not
need many additional processes, especially no atomic ixpc
(==wmiir in the past), you can simply use the redirections of
the shell.

My idea is rather radical how I'd control wmii-future from a
script: just drop the wmiirc script and put that stuff into the
wmii script which should be user-supplied, this produces lesser
clunk and is still easy.

Just some thoughts...

Regards,

-- 
 Anselm R. Garbe >< http://suckless.org/~arg/ >< GPG key: 0D73F361