Configuration
Hi,
so I’d like to do some idle talk about simplifying the configuration system of Xfce4.5.
All the possibilities I heard so far do not go far enough.
What I’d like to see is it to be simplified to the max by:
using one (real) file per setting (yes _setting_) in “.config/xfce4/”If the setting points to a file (for example background image), it should be a symlink to the file. Otherwise it should be a regular file containing the value as readable string.
So for our (more or less) current settings,
http://xfce.wikia.com/wiki/Simple_Settings
That isn’t all that much, is it?
Advantages are:
* simple to copy/merge
* simple to understand
* can use all the normal unix tools
(symlink the important ones to another directory etc)
simple to change by script
uses normal unix tree api and doesn’t introduce another version of it (xml, ini file, whatever)
uses file change notification to be notified of changes (not xsettings)
Disadvantage:
* wastes space on old filesystems – aren’t that many files though!
As a means to fix the only remaining disadvantage, I’d suggest writing/mounting a FUSE module that stores the settings in a bdb or something.
pyxfce
Well well … today I got pyxfce (python bindings for xfce) working for the first time. The initmodule looks like the most evil hack of a long time, but hey :P
Seems that most of the panel stuff was not detected correctly by the automatic codegenerator h2def. Need to code that manually. Or wait for jasper to gobjectize everything, whatever comes first.
I had some trouble with h2def expecting gobject-enums everywhere, but since ours aren’t (ours are just regular C enums) it doesnt work. After some egrep it seems fine …
Need to find out how to get the generator to find classes in other modules in the same directory. Now I get messages like ‘Could not write constructor for NetkPager: No ArgType for ‘NetkScreen*’
‘ and such kind of gibberish. Ow well… it will be defeated, eventually.
pirate name
Now for my pirate name :)
Quite unexpected, to me, at least :)
X(f)term colors
Well,
people are asking how to change xfterm color,
and I noticed that its not documented anywhere here.
xfterm4 is a wrapper that calls the terminal defined in the TERMCMD environment variable or else xterm.
So, to do that, you define so called X resources for xterm.
The program “xrdb” aids you with that, either directly by calling it and typing, or you put it into a file in your home directory, called .Xresources
Your xinit scripts will usually call xrdb for you.
An example Xresources file is at http://www.gonetoo.de/dannym/Xresources
X resources apply only to newly opened programs, so reopen your Xterm
Hope that helps someone :)
Boo !
Just wanted to say hi to the world…
Hi!
If you are wondering who I am, you are not alone. I sometimes wonder too ;)
Anyways, xfce related I am breaking…. uh working on the mixer program&panel plugin, allowing xfce users to unintentionally increase the sound card volume to the max, risking the neighbours hit you hard for damaging their ears… (hi Jasper ;))
Seriously though, this and some minimalist freedesktop menuspec implementation is all I ever committed to this great project… I want to have more free time to be able to spend hacking on xfce ;)
(and since I also like python and delphi, and relational databases, each day should have about 40 hours for me to have enough time ;))
Risking a pureness war here, I found “gob”, a preprocessor for C which makes gobject based work so much easier (as opposed to pure C). It has a java-like syntax and almost the whole mixer is written using it, and so far I am very pleased with gob2. Give it a try.
Either way, I’m off playing ut2004 demo since it finished downloading… yay ! ;)