hmenu

hmenu is intended to be a drop-in replacement for, and successor to, the suckless dmenu tool. The core focus is to make it better at handling streams of data, such as menu alternatives coming from a slow internet connection.

Much work still needs to be done, though.

Rough todo:

1. Refactor TextRendering so it's not a mess. A bunch of arguments could probably be abstracted away in the RenderInfo data type.
2. Take care of input from the user!
3. Read alternatives lazily from stdin.
4. Search among the alternatives based on what the user writes.
5. Let the user select alternatives with arrow keys and such.
6. Print the alternative to stdout when the user has pressed return.
7. Fix convenience stuff to mimick dmenu better. This includes pasting, emacs-like shortcuts for deleting and navigation and such.

For Collaborators

Module structure:

• Main.hs is the entry point of the application. This is where X gets initialised, a window is created and there's an event receiving loop.
• MenuConf.hs is a module that contains configuration information for the application (and also the AppEvent datatype).
• Graphics.hs contains the higher-level API for opening the menu window, updating its contents and so on.
• TextRendering.hs contains helper functions for... well, rendering text, such as figuring out line heights, offsets and what have you.
• X.hs contains basic wrappers around Xlib procedures.

For users

To build, make sure you have a somewhat recent GHC and cabal-install >= 1.18 (for sandboxes). Then just

git clone git@github.com:kqr/hmenu.git
cd hmenu
cabal sandbox init
cabal install --only-dependencies
cabal build

and then you should have your executable as dist/build/hmenu/hmenu!

Be aware that since lens is currently a dependency, installing might take some time. I should probably think about switching to a more lightweight lens library at some point.