One of the features of dwm is that whatever you pipe into stdin ends up in the status bar at the top of the screen. I thought this would be a great way of getting the last message from a jabber chat onto the screen.<\/p>\n
There aren’t really a lot of examples of how this works. I think there is one in the dwm README file that shows how to get a clock into the status bar. You put this into your ~\/.xinitrc:<\/p>\n
\r\nwhile :\r\ndo\r\n date\r\n sleep 1\r\ndone | \/usr\/local\/bin\/dwm<\/pre>\nI thought I’d just redirect stdin for dwm from a fifo file and then I can pump data into the fifo whenever I like. ie. Put this in your .xinitrc<\/p>\n
\r\n[ -f \/tmp\/myfifo ] && rm -f \/tmp\/myfifo\r\nmkfifo \/tmp\/myfifo\r\n\/usr\/local\/bin\/dwm <\/tmp\/myfifo<\/pre>\nI found that didn’t work as I expected and dwm tended to hang on startup (maybe it was waiting for something in the fifo??<\/p>\n
I use mcabber as a jabber chat client, so here is what I did to get the status bar to update with the last chat message<\/p>\n
1. In .xinitrc I have:<\/p>\n
\r\ntouch ~\/.mcabber\/log\r\ntail -f ~\/.mcabber\/log | while read x\r\ndo\r\n cat \"$x\"\r\n # remove the message file since nothing else will\r\n rm -f \"$x\"\r\ndone | \/usr\/local\/bin\/dwm<\/pre>\n2. In ~\/.mcabberrc I turn on event logging and have an event script:<\/p>\n
\r\nset events_command = ~\/mcabber-eventcmd.sh\r\nset event_log_files = 1\r\nset event_log_dir = ~\/.mcabber\/event_files<\/pre>\n3. In my ~\/mcabber-eventcmd.sh script I have:<\/p>\n
\r\n#!\/bin\/sh\r\nif [ \"$1\" = MSG ];then\r\n aplay ~\/chat2.wav\r\nfi\r\nif [ \"$1\" = MSG ];then\r\n echo \"$4\" >>~\/.mcabber\/log\r\nfi<\/pre>\nThe aplay command is purely to play a sound when I get a new message, but the 2nd if statement appends the event file for the message to a log file (this is the log file referenced in the .xinitrc).<\/p>\n
So what happens is that you get a message in or out in mcabber, it runs the mcabber-eventcmd.sh script. That script appends details of a message file to a log file. Meanwhile the while loop in the .xinitrc is watching that log file. Everytime there’s a new line in the log file, the content of the file is piped into the stdin of dwm (via the ‘cat’) and the message appears on screen.<\/p>\n
The scripts above are simplistic .. and don’t handle very long messages or multiline messages very well. And you’ll notice that the status bar takes about 1 second to change (this is probably to do with the tail -f)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the features of dwm is that whatever you pipe into stdin ends up in the status bar at the top of the screen. I thought this would be a great way of getting the last message from a jabber chat onto the screen. There aren’t really a lot of examples of how this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}