Changes: Tips

Revision as of 08:00, 5 January 2010

You're encouraged to record even the tiniest tips here!

If you have any questions, you can write it in #Questions?, but the response will be faster to ask in the Mailing list.

Contents classification

Usage & Howto

How to make two-stroke key binding

You can make two-stroke (or more) key binding.

For example, to make Hyper-e e run emacs,

(define my-emacs-keymap (make-keymap))
(bind-keys global-keymap "H-e" my-emacs-keymap)
(bind-keys my-emacs-keymap
           "E" '(run-shell-command "emacsclient -c")
           "e" '(run-shell-command "urxvt -e emacsclient -t")
           "r" '(run-shell-command "emacsclient -e '(make-remember-frame)'")
           "g" '(gimme-exact-name "Gnus")
           "w" '(gimme-exact-name "w3m"))

(Gimme is a user-contributed script.) More nesting also works. Thanks to Jose A. Ortega Ruiz and Jason Dunsmore.

How can I set viewport for each xterm?

$ xterm -geometry +0+2000
does the job, but the coordinate is relative to the current one. So this is useful for xinitrc or .Xclients Alternatively,
$ xterm -title "foovar"
and using 'matched window' do the job. The title is changed by the shell as soon as the shell starts, so there isn't any visible change. Do match against name "foo-var" manually. (Grab doesn't work, because the window name is already changed by the shell.) There you can specify viewport and workspace.

This works for xterm, but not always, because software may set the title 1 sec after the window appears.

Starting from Sawfish 1.6, you can use the new `new-viewport' window-matcher to achieve this:

( add-window-matcher 'WM_CLASS "^XTerm/xterm$"
  '( new-viewport . t ) )

How to search lisp functions & variables

ack

Ack is something like 'find + grep', written in perl. In Debian, it is renamed to 'ack-grep'.

Quickstart: Prepare ~/.ackrc. An example:

# define 'rep type'; this is something like an alias to *.jl
--type-set=rep=.jl
# use less by default and set its options
--pager=less -R -M --shift 5 -i
# always color
--color

Sample session:

$ cd sawfish-1.3.4
$ ack "max-height"

Output; matched parts get highlighted:

src/windows.c:55:DEFSYM(max_height, "max-height");
src/windows.c:1253:`max-height', `min-width', `max-width', `height-inc', `width-inc',
lisp/sawfish/wm/commands/size-window.jl:54:        (y-max (cdr (assq 'max-height hints)))
lisp/sawfish/wm/windows.jl:259:                               'max-width 'max-height) hints)) 65535))
lisp/sawfish/wm/state/maximize.jl:275:      (max-height (cdr (assq 'max-height hints)))
...

Note that the search is recursive. If you want to exclude C files, then either of these do the job:

$ ack --nocc "max-height" - by disabling 'cc' files. Or --norep ignores *.jl files, as defined in ~/.ackrc
$ ack "max-height" lisp/ - by specifying directories.

Some tips:

In C src, - (hyphen) is _ (underscore), like max_height
By default, *.jlc files are ignored.
Don't forget to search for librep and rep-gtk source.

git-grep

If you have git repository,
$ git grep "max-height" lisp/
does almost the same as ack.

emacs tags

If someone knows it, please write it here. Note that in rep, these three definitons exist:

(define (func-name args,
(defun func-name (args,
Sfunc-name (in C files.)

Latest source is preferred over old byte-compiled file

In librep/sawfish, the latest source *.jl file is used, instead of the not-updated byte-compiled *.jlc files, unlike emacs. This is extremely useful in testing.

Output debugging info

Example:

(format standard-error "last-command: \"%s\"\n" last-command)

To use this technique for sawfish-ui, the GUI configurator, remember that stdout and stderr are redirected to /dev/null in wm/customize.jl.

From Sawfish-1.6.0, output of sawfish-config (renamed from sawfish-ui) can be redirected with customize-redirect variable.

Nested X Server

Sometimes it is interesting to run X11 programs inside a different X server. This can be done via tools like Xnest or Xephyr. If you want you can use a different user account so you can run completly different configurations for the processes running inside the virtual servers.

IMPORTANT TODO: look if it is possible (and how) to get Xinerama or similar things.

Xnest

Xnest is an old server, that runs as a window of another. It is the part of X. Simplest thing is to run it as DISPLAY :2 and without access checks.

$ Xnest -ac :2
$ export DISPLAY=:2
$ sawfish

You can try with a more complex version, one that sets root window to black, loads xauth info (created with first command), uses two "monitors" of 400*300 (you will get :2.0 and :2.1), disables keyboard extension (this helps if the layout is non US) and then launches different programs, making sure sawfish handles all the screens.

$ echo localhost > ~/.xauth
$ Xnest -br -auth ~/.xauth -scrns 2 -geometry 400x300 -kb :2
$ export DISPLAY=:2
$ sawfish --multihead &
$ export DISPLAY=:2.0
$ xterm &
$ export DISPLAY=:2.1
$ xeyes &

Xephyr

Xephyr is similar to Xnest in what it does, but it has a newer code base and supports some modern X extensions (even if host server doesn't) such as Composite, Damage, RandR. For the best possible performance it uses SHM images and updates the shadow framebuffer via the Damage extension. It also has a visual debugging mode for observing screen updates.

Notice the size parameter is different.

$ Xephyr -ac -screen 800x600 :2
$ export DISPLAY=:2
$ sawfish

How to debug crashes under debian

A way to debug sawfish crashes under debian is described here, and more details here.

Getting info on windows

You can use xwininfo or xprop to obtain information on windows. The first gives mostly geometry info and some states, the later lists the window properties (WM_*, _NET_*, _WIN_* etc) and can be very verbose sometimes (_NET_WM_ICON tends to be huge, eg).

To list all windows whilst cutting out the bulk of the noise, try

xwininfo -root -tree | egrep -v 'child(ren)?:|\(has no name\)'

Another thing to look up is xrdb for classic X11 apps. xrdb -query lists current data in the X resource database, like default sizes, positions, colours or states.

Insert here where to look for info about common toolkit configs.

How can I learn rep? How does it differ from other lisps?

See here.

Info compilation

Info can be compiled without running configure with:

$ makeinfo  -I . sawfish.texi -o sawfish.info

Emacs bug in highlight & syntax parsing?

Put

(setq open-paren-in-column-0-is-defun-start nil)

in .emacs.el, if you exprerience highlight and syntax analysis bug in Emacs lisp and sawfish mode.

Actually, this is not a bug. Emacs assumes the oper paren '(' in the first column as a beginning of the defun for speed hack.

sawfish-client usage

Add -e option to make it output error messages.
You can exit from sawfish-client by pressing C-d.

Starting from Sawfish 1.6, you can use ,quit to exit from sawfish-client

Note that C-c kills the Client AND the Window Manager!

How to manage customization files

Each has their own taste, so here're examples.

Put customization files under version control system, like git, svn, etc.
Break up things into files, and make .sawfish/rc be a collection of requires.
Byte compilation can reveal some syntax errors.

Sawfish wrapper scripts

Invoking sawfish from a wrapper script is sometimes a good idea. See [1] and [2].

Signal during initialization breaks sawfish

A signal sent by (signal 'error-symbol data) during the initialization breaks the sawfish process.

Patches in mail archive

Note that in the web interfarce of the mailing list archive, some @ signs are not displayed. (It should be. Think of foo@bar.net -> foo bar net.) This can be problematic for texinfo files. Use the original message in your mua or download the gzipped text.

Sawfish and xdg-open

xdg-open is a generic way of letting an "unspecified" application open a given file, eg: xdg-open $HOME may open $HOME in any software which is setup to open inode/directory (or x-directory/normal) mime-types. Unfurtionally another `open' is needed, either kfmclient (KDE), exo-open (XFCE) or gnome-open (GNOME), sawfish doesn't have one, therefore xdg-open is only a minimalistic stub when using sawfish standalone. Next follows how to make xdg-open use gnome-open (may be changed to kfmclient/exo-open, of course) instead:

In your resource put:

(set-x-text-property 'root 'WINDOW_MANAGER (vector "sawfish"))

next make xdg-open WINDOW_MANAGER property aware, open /usr/bin/xdg-open go to detectDE() function and add the 3rd elif below:

#--------------------------------------
# Checks for known desktop environments
# set variable DE to the desktop environments name, lowercase

detectDE()
{
    if [ x"$KDE_FULL_SESSION" = x"true" ]; then DE=kde;
    elif [ x"$GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID" != x"" ]; then DE=gnome;
    elif xprop -root _DT_SAVE_MODE | grep ' = \"xfce4\"$' >/dev/null 2>&1; then DE=xfce;
    # add the line below
    elif xprop -root WINDOW_MANAGER | grep ' = \"sawfish\"' >/dev/null 2>&1; then DE=gnome; 
    fi
}

to change the default applications, issue xdg-mime, as an example we'll let nautilus open directories:

as root:
xdg-mime default nautilus-folder-handler.desktop inode/directory

arguement 2 must be a valid .desktop in either /usr/share/applications or $HOME/.local/share/applications arguement 3 must be a valid mimetype

Questions?

If you have any questions, you can write it here, but the response will be faster to ask in the Mailing list.

External links

Christopher Bratusek gives some tips at [3] and [4].

@@ Line 259: / Line 259: @@
 == Questions? ==
 If you have any questions, you can write it here, but the response will be faster to ask in the [http://sawfish.wikia.com/wiki/Community#Mailing_List Mailing list].
+== External links ==
+* Christopher Bratusek gives some tips at [http://www.nanolx.org/newslinux/] and [http://www.nanolx.org/newssawfish].
 [[Category:Documentation]]