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It's been over one week since the release of wmii-3, the dynamic window manager thats boasts

Wimp (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointing device) is dead!

It took me one day to grow accustomed to the new tag-based workspaces, and a couple to stabilize my setup.

wmii ships with a few shell scripts that control the behavior of the WM: key bindings, menu bar, default options... I was more than willing to rewrite them in Ruby in order to get rid of that echo, sed, awk, etc. mess. In the process I abstracted things a little bit, making it easier to handle the events reported by the WM.

I can now define basic keybindings as follows:

  on_key("#{MODKEY}-#{LEFT}"){ write "/view/ctl", "select prev" }
  on_key("#{MODKEY}-#{RIGHT}"){ write "/view/ctl", "select next" }
  on_key("#{MODKEY}-#{DOWN}"){ write "/view/sel/ctl", "select next" }
  on_key("#{MODKEY}-#{UP}"){ write "/view/sel/ctl", "select prev" }

Other events are easily defined too. This is my "volume applet":

  on_barclick(volume_name, MOUSE_SCROLL_UP){ update_volume[+1] }
  on_barclick(volume_name, MOUSE_SCROLL_DOWN){ update_volume[-1] }

The good thing about using Ruby is that adding extra logic isn't a PITA, as it is in shell script, at least for me. The following snippet allows me to retag the current client partially, replacing only the numerical tag and leaving the other ones untouched:

  (0..9).each do |key|
    on_key("#{MODKEY}-Shift-#{key}") do
      oldtags = read("/view/sel/sel/tags").split(/\+/).reject{|x| /^\d+$/ =~ x}
      write "/view/sel/sel/tags", (oldtags + [key]).join("+")
    end
  end

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