Orcsome¶
Orcsome is a scripting extension for NETWM compliant window managers. It can help a lot to customize your work environment.
Motivation¶
I’m old awesome user with two year experience. I like it not for tiling but for lua and ability to tune its behavior. But for a very long time some problems stay unsolved:
- Grey swing windows. I was hoping it will be fixed in java7 but no luck.
- Input focus for swing windows. Awesome treats such windows as inputless.
- Random focus problems. For example sometimes evince or opera save dialog are not take focus.
Simply put, awesome sucks as window manager.
I need a robust wm with long devel history, small, fast, candy and scriptable on normal language (hello fvwm). But there are a plenty of robust, small, fast and candy only wm’s. There is no any scriptable.
So I decide to write tiny wm helper application which will be compatible with many window managers and allow to configure flexible workflows.
Features¶
- Written in python. It means very hackable.
- Optimization, cpu and memory efficiency are top goals.
- Extensive use of python syntax to provide easy and expressive eDSL in configuration script.
- Supports NETWM standards.
- Very thin wrapper around X. You can use existing xlib background.
Installation¶
Orcsome needs only python-xlib as dependency. Install it from your distributive repository.
From PyPI¶
I’m regularly upload packages of new versions. So you can install orcsome with easy_install:
sudo easy_install orcsome
or pip:
sudo pip install orcsome
From source¶
git clone --depth=1 git://github.com/baverman/orcsome.git
cd orcsome
python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install
If you often pull changes from master brunch I recommend you following recipe:
First install orcsome in develop mode (remove any orcsome dirs in site-packages before that):
sudo python setup.py develop
Then, if you want use latest version from master branch simply do:
cd cloned/orcsome/dir git pull
ArchLinux¶
There is orcsome package in AUR.
Quick start¶
The most common functionality needed is to bind hot keys to spawn or raise applications.
Edit ~/.config/orcsome/rc.py:
from orcsome import get_wm
from orcsome.actions import *
wm = get_wm()
wm.on_key('Shift+Mod+r')(
restart)
wm.on_key('Ctrl+Alt+p')(
spawn_or_raise('urxvtc -name ncmpcpp -e ncmpcpp', name='ncmpcpp'))
wm.on_key('Mod+n')(
spawn_or_raise('urxvtc -name mutt -e mutt', name='mutt'))
wm.on_key('Mod+k')(
spawn_or_raise('urxvtc -name rtorrent -e rtorrent-screen', name='rtorrent'))
And start orcsome. That’s all.