[xmonad] XMonad.Prompt.File (attached)

[Norbert Zeh]

John J Foerch [2011.03.17 2345 -0400]:

[...]

> Sorry it couldn't be a more profound, creative, and interesting module :D
> but that's what I needed.  Shell prompt does not fit the bill for two
> reasons: 1) its prompt string is hard-coded as "Run: ", and 2) I wanted
> expansion of '~/' but not other special characters, so I have to
> manipulate the return value before passing it on to spawn.
> 
> For context, I'm using this in several screenshot commands which prompt
> for the name of the output file.
> 
> Maybe there is a better approach for prompting for directories and files
> both, but the existence of an XMonad.Prompt.Directory and no
> XMonad.Prompt.File looks to me like a simple omission.  If the latter is a
> hack, then so is the former, but I'm not campaigning for any outcome, only
> offering something that I have found useful to others.

I agree with you on the level that it is odd that there should be a module that
handles directories but cannot do the same for files and, what's worse, has a
name that clearly states it deals only with directories, making my suggestion
(1) below a bit suboptimal.

However, the issue of whether this functionality is already offered by another
module aside, there are still two fairly clean ways of including this
functionality for files without the cutting and pasting:

(1) Simply add the functionality you need to X.P.Directory, factoring the code
common to both handling directories and files.

(2) Move all the code for directories and files to X.P.File, again properly
factoring it to avoid code duplication.  Then rewrite the existing
X.P.Directory as a thin wrapper that imports X.P.File and reexports the
directory-specific functions.  The second part of this solution is to not break
configurations that currently use X.P.Directory.

I think (2) is preferable over (1) because "Directory" suggests that this
module can deal with directories but not with files, while in my experience,
modules named File-something usually deal with different types of files,
including directories.

Cheers,
Norbert