Verve: Command line plugin

Jannis Pohlmann info at sten-net.de
Sat Feb 4 09:44:55 CET 2006


Hi all,

during the last three days, I've been busy on implementing an enhanced
alternative to the current minicmd plugin for the panel. It's not
intended to be a replacement, I just wrote it out of personal interest
in GTK+, C and the magic of ThunarVFS (which is not used at the moment,
but certainly will be).

This plugin already features:

  - autocompletion for binaries in $PATH and 'virtual' commands (via
    <Tab> key)
  - custom 'virtual' commands (see below)
  - opening eMail addresses and URLs using exo-open (from SVN)

Features to be implemented in the near future:

  - move current 'virtual' commands implementation into an
    editing interface for user scripts in ~/bin
  - plugin configuration dialog
  - support startup notification
  - use ThunarVFS to detected changes in $PATH, so we can update
    the command database
  - command history browsing like in minicmd

The previously mentioned 'virtual' command system:

  You can create a directory ~/.config/Verve and put rc files in there.
  There currently are two types of commands: simple and script. Simple
  rc files have too look like this:

    ~/.config/Verve/simple-test.desktop (.desktop is a must, but
    used wrong here, I know):

      Name=simple-test
      Type=0
      Command=thunar

  This will run 'thunar' when you type 'simple-test' in the Verve
  command input.

  Script rc files have too look like this:

    ~/.config/Verve/script-test.desktop:

      Name=script-test
      Type=0
      Target=my-test-script
      Shell=ruby

    Verve will now search for a file 'my-test-script' in
    ~/.config/Verve/. This file has to be a ruby script in this case,
    because it will be interpreted as such. Additionally, it has to be
    executable.

    Instead of using the shell 'ruby', you can also use 'bash', 'sh',
    'fish', 'python' and 'php'.

You can fetch an experimental snapshot from:

  http://gezeiten.org/~jannis/Verve-experimental.tar.bz2

You'll need SCons for building the project. Please note that the plugin
is automatically installed into /usr/local/libexec/xfce4/panel-plugins.
You can change this in the SConstruct file easily if you need.

Hope you'll enjoy it. Of course, I'd love to get some feedback of course.

Take care,
Jannis



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