Arch Linux

Xilon

Member

Registered: 2007-01-01

Posts: 243

Re: What's the difference in the user experience of ion3, wmii and dwm.

The really cool thing about wmii is that the statusbar is "file based", and you can control it externally. That means that you can make "hooks" for various applications which update the statusbar for you, so instead of polling for info all the time, like in dwm, (inefficient, you are now just posting information when it gets updated, in some cases anyway. I for instance had mutt run a script which updated a "new mail" counter every time I quit it, and also a cron job ran the same script right after it ran fdm .

I remember you mentioned that on IRC a while ago. It still looks pointless to me.
Polling the mails is probably more costly in the first place, since it requires a network connection, and you have to use polling there anyway. But everyone does it, and it's not a big problem, or is it?
So I don't see how polling the filesystem after that is worse.
Besides, I dislike the idea how launching / exiting mutt all the time. Since you are talking about efficiency, that is really inefficient
In any cases, I prefer just letting mutt run in a screen session a long time.

I'm not denying that wmii status bar is cool, just that I don't find it very practical.

Well if you run mutt all the time then the exit hook is useless, there might be other hooks. It's more efficient than polling every minute or half an hour or whatever because it gets updated when there is most likely to be a changed. When fdm runs it might not get any new mail, but there's a good chance it does, so the script is ran there, same with exiting mutt.

The advantage of wmii is that the files are separate, and it's possible to update them at any time you want. You can just `echo blah | wmiir write /rbar/blah` (might be wrong syntax) and suddenly "blah" appears on the statusbar. This file does not have to be updated, but can be updated at any time you wish. You can have a much more dynamic statusbar, where only useful information is displayed. If you have no mail or IM messages then you don't have to have any information about it in the bar, but once you do you can easily create it. It just has some really cool potential, but I haven't really seen anyone use it in any cool way. You could write an mpd client that updates the statusbar on song change or something.

shining

Pacman Developer

Registered: 2006-05-10

Posts: 2,043

Re: What's the difference in the user experience of ion3, wmii and dwm.

Well if you run mutt all the time then the exit hook is useless, there might be other hooks. It's more efficient than polling every minute or half an hour or whatever because it gets updated when there is most likely to be a changed. When fdm runs it might not get any new mail, but there's a good chance it does, so the script is ran there, same with exiting mutt.

The advantage of wmii is that the files are separate, and it's possible to update them at any time you want. You can just `echo blah | wmiir write /rbar/blah` (might be wrong syntax) and suddenly "blah" appears on the statusbar. This file does not have to be updated, but can be updated at any time you wish. You can have a much more dynamic statusbar, where only useful information is displayed. If you have no mail or IM messages then you don't have to have any information about it in the bar, but once you do you can easily create it. It just has some really cool potential, but I haven't really seen anyone use it in any cool way. You could write an mpd client that updates the statusbar on song change or something.

What you said about mpd just proves what I meant by "not practical". If you want to avoid polling, you need to rewrite every app that might have interesting informations so that they can send it to the status bar. Or rather just allow to place hooks on most actions.
It's usually not worth the trouble.

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pacman roulette : pacman -S $(pacman -Slq | LANG=C sort -R | head -n $((RANDOM % 10)))