[xmonad] New keybinding parser

[David Roundy]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 05:39:23PM -0500, Brent Yorgey wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've just pushed (what I hope is) an exciting patch to XMonad.Util.EZConfig.
> It now exports a bunch of functions for parsing keybindings, emacs-style.
> That's right, instead of typing
> 
>   ((modMask x .|. shiftMask .|. controlMask, xK_F12), action)
> 
> or other such boilerplate drudgery, you can now just say
> 
>   ("M-S-C-<F12>", action).
> 
> Submaps are also supported -- just do something like
> 
>   ("M-x p", action1)
>   ("M-x q", action2)
> 
> and it does the right thing.  Detailed documentation is included, so look
> there for a more thorough explanation and examples.  As always, comments,
> bug reports, and patches welcome.

This sounds nice, but I can't help but wonder if we can't do one up, and
provide our users with a handy interface that doesn't allow them to run
into run-time parse errors.  Something like

  (m 'q', action0)
  (m $ s $ c f12, action1)
  (m $ s $ c 'x', action2)

should be trivial to implement (albeit eating up the namespace rather
ferociously), and would give a bit more safety with only a
slightly-less-pretty syntax.  Submaps would require a bit more syntax, but
something like

  (m x &&& 'q')

should be implementable.  I'm not sure if this would be deemed worthwhile,
but it seems to me a bit more elegant than parsing strings into key
bindings.

David