Re: [RP] ANSI escape sequences

[Benno]

On Mon Nov 24, 2003 at 00:28:29 +0100, Florian Cramer wrote:
>Am Sonntag, 23. November 2003 um 13:28:08 Uhr (-0800) schrieb Shawn Betts:
> 
>> I'm intrigued, though. I like the part where it cleans up the bar
>> code. That's a good thing. But I'm having trouble finding use cases
>> where ansi colors are really needed. Can you supply some more
>> convincing ones?

I'm not sure about "really needed", however I use the bar as a general
light weight `notification area'. That is I have a bunch of scripts
that display output in the bar using my rat.py module.

I find having colour to be particularly useful in converying information
fast (like bright red when I receive an import email). Of course I guess
this is a slippery slope, other people find images to convery a bunch
of information so someone may want to put images into the bar as well.

I guess the other way I could approach this is to make my scripts draw 
their own bar in the same place as the ratpoison bar, however that
seems to be an awful duplication of functionality.

>> What do other people think about this patch?
>
>The imminent danger is that the rp bar is gradually becoming an
>xterm. The radical alternative would be to rip it out entirely (or
>allow not to compile it in) and delegate its function to external
>commandline/terminal control...
>

I did think of this at one stage (and had patches to do so), but I
found that in practice it was slightly painful.

However I'd be more than happy if someone wanted to do the split.
At the same time I would suggest splitting the key-handling out
as well, since there are already a plethora of programs that handle
keystrokes. These programs could just call ratpoison -c "xxx". Or
if you don't like the fork overhead, you could code them up to just
send an X message to ratpoion.

In my defence... I think the ANSI colour patch makes bar.c smaller
than it was.