Custom dmenu alternative with terminal, but dock mode script broken

asked 2014-08-03 21:17:21 +0000

Anonymous

I have been trying to play with this on and off for a while. I like dmenu, but I make use of a lot customized character encodings and RTL languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian). I would like to use dmenu, but it mangles this terribly. For terminal use, I have to use mlterm because of these constraints. I would like to have a terminal-based menu manager, like dmenu, or rather bashrun and even closer slmenu.

I thought the best of both worlds would be bashrun, but is not quite what I want as the completions were strange and it runs slow. Slmenu also seems to have problems with the input I have tried in non-English characters.

So, I would rather write up my own scripts and run them directly in the terminal (mlterm). Of course I can do that easily, but I also want to have it pop-up on the bottom like dmenu -b I am currently using extensively for customized menus and ops.

I found a Github gist that almost does what I want to emulate _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_DOCK call required by i3 (i3wm.org/docs/wsbar.html) dock mode and other WMs. I modified it from urxvt to mlterm. Problem is focus is still on the previous app (and cannot do much because of -SIGSTOP. Secondly, regardless of changing the bottom variable for _NET_WM_STRUT_PARTIAL variable to different sizes, it always appears to take 1/3 to 1/4 of the bottom of the screen. Freedesktop documentation (standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/1.3/ar01s05.html) suggests it should not work this way. Code below.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
TERM=mlterm
TERMNAME=mlterm-dock
XSCREENWIDTH=$(xrandr | grep \* | sed -e 's/x.*//' -e 's/^ *//')
TERMHEIGHT=10
TERMWIDTH=$XSCREENWIDTH
killall -SIGSTOP i3
$TERM --geometry=$TERMWIDTHx$TERMHEIGHT --name="$TERMNAME" &
sleep 1
TERMXID=0x$(xwininfo -root -tree | grep "$TERMNAME" | sed -e 's/.*0x//' -e 's/ .*//')
xprop -id $TERMXID -f _NET_WM_STRUT_PARTIAL 32cccccccccccc -set _NET_WM_STRUT_PARTIAL "0, 0, 0, 10, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, $TERMWIDTH"
xprop -id $TERMXID -f _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE 32a -set _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_DOCK
killall -SIGCONT i3

So is there a better way to accomplish this. Ideas?