[Xmonad] Re: scripting xmonad externally?

Stefan O'Rear stefanor at cox.net
Tue Jul 24 01:49:11 EDT 2007


On Tue, Jul 24, 2007 at 03:44:26PM +1000, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> gmane.xmonad.zed2323:
> > I wrote (in summary):
> > > > The thing I'm most missing from ratpoison and wmii is an external api, which
> > > > makes them extensible from external programs (and any language.)
> > > > 
> > > > Are there any plans to offer such an interface in Xmonad in the future?
> > 
> > Donald Bruce Stewart <dons at ...> writes:
> > > There's the Command.hs interface in the contrib module, used for some of
> > > this. At the moment I don't think there's any plan to embed a scripting
> > > language directly in xmonad: far better to extend Commands.hs to say,
> > > use ghc-api, to allow arbitrary haskell extension if you want it.
> > 
> > I wasn't referring to an embedded scripting language, but a generic API that
> > would allow external scripts to communicate with Xmonad, both to read its state
> > and to issue commands, like ratpoison's and wmii's APIs do. This would open up
> > scripting in any language. Ease of scripting is what I find to be one of the
> > attractions of those languages, and it'd be great to be able to script Xmonad in
> > a language I already know (thought it's also nice to have the excuse to learn
> > Haskell...)
> 
> Have a look at Commands.hs, which is currently used to control xmonad
> from the shell, but you surely can interact with it any way you want.

Actually, commands uses dmenu synchronously and parses the string
in-process.  While it would be nice to control xmonad using a socket
model, ISTR sjanssen saying { -package X11 is nearly impossible to use
with threads, and this is one of the main motivations for XHSB. }.  You
can kluge around it by adding a handler for root PropertyNotify events
on XMONAD_COMMAND and dispatching accordingly, then use xprop to control
it; thus embedding the control channel over X11.  (Not a small task, but
most of the details could be in a re-usable contrib module...)

Stefan
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