Awesome: Better terminal detection in default config

[blueyed]

One annoyance when being dropped into the default config is that you are getting xterm as your terminal.

E.g. with Debian based systems, we could default to x-terminal-emulator.

I am using urxvt myself, but there seems to be nothing like x-terminal-emulator for Arch Linux, or is there?

[actionless]

ugly but working for me:

awesome-client 'require("awful").spawn.with_shell("unknown_term || xterm || urxvt")'

(can't wait for a https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/issues/1166 :) )

[blueyed]

Where is unknown_term coming from?

[actionless]

it's an example of terminal command which should fail, like unknown_term is not installed, but xterm is

UPD however that approach will cause weird behavior if terminal will exit with non-zero

[actionless]

or we could try to do it cleaner but still weird, like:

awful.newmodule.terminals = {'x-terminal-emulator', 'xterm', 'urxvt', 'st', 'whatever else'}

local found_terminal

function awful.newmodule.get_terminal(callback)
  if found_terminal then
    return callback(found_terminal)
  end
  local terminal_index = 1

  local function _check_next()
    local terminal = awful.newmodule.terminals[terminal_index]
    awful.spawn.easy_async('which ' .. terminal, function(_, _, _, exit_code)
      if exit_code == 0 then 
        found_terminal = terminal
        callback(found_terminal)
      else
        terminal_index = terminal_index + 1
        if terminal_index <= #awful.newmodule.terminals then
          _check_next()
        else
          -- what to do if nothing found? :)
        end
      end
    end)
  end

  _check_next()
end

function awful.newmodule.set_terminal(terminal)
   found_terminal = terminal
end

<...>

awful.newmodule.set_terminal('urxvt')

<...>

    awful.key({ modkey,           }, "Return", function ()
                   awful.newmodule.get_terminal(function(term) awful.spawn(term) end)
              end,
              {description = "open a terminal", group = "launcher"}),

[blueyed]

Yeah, I see - but in this example xterm would still be preferred.
We should not over-engineer it, but just try to look at what distributions provide.

[actionless]

ah, i've got the point

then we could allow it to override it somehow, see updated example

[actionless]

btw, do we still have some synchronous spawn? it would be easier to use get_terminal() as synchronous function which returns terminal

[mindeunix]

In Debian (and ubuntu?), we can simply call x-terminal-emulator -e /some/command, unfortunately not all distros includes x-terminal-emulator...

P.S
it would be nice to have a new menu item which opens API documentation:
xdg-open http://new.awesomewm.org/apidoc/index.html

[actionless]

regarding the latter point -- i think it would be better to use file:///usr/share/doc/awesome/doc/index.html instead

[r3lgar]

file:///usr/share/doc/awesome/doc/index.html instead

Only with docs installed, otherwise we need to go to wiki website. So we need yet another parser. Useless, don't need.

Link in man page should be enough.

[actionless]

built documentation will match the installed awesome version while online documentation will not

[psychon]

btw, do we still have some synchronous spawn? it would be easier to use get_terminal() as synchronous function which returns terminal

Which synchronous functions were available? The only one that I remember is awful.util.pread and that was just some small wrapper around io.popen: https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/blob/061751dd9d3a3f08e4efa1739adb4f93e73bee98/lib/awful/util.lua.in#L93-L107

Edit: And of course, the first if here doesn't help anyone, so is useless. The next if f is always true, because io.popen can in practice only fail due to out-of-memory.

[actionless]

yup, that was the one i kept in mind

what do you think of using it for cached sycnhronous get_terminal() function? (see asynchronous example in one of my comments above: https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/issues/1217#issuecomment-259575577)

[psychon]

I would think that it would not help you / would not work.
You cannot get the exit code with popen (you can not even redirect stderr, so all unsuccessful lookups would spam awesome's stderr with something like "sh: sl: command not found").

[actionless]

@Elv13 mb glib have some analogue of which command?