Introduction to wmpipe

The basic idea behind wmpipe is to create a library of shell functions that enable the quick creation of dynamic (pipe) menus for certain X Window Managers.

The basic requirements were a logical and consistent code layout, efficient code execution (so as to offset the shell overhead), portability to different distros/os's and the ability to customize and integrate the menus easily into a user's desktop.

The distribution contains several sample scripts of varying utility that cover some of the most common usages for pipe menus. Of interest and to display the modular nature of the code, the scripts are implemented as multi-call executables (like busybox). In other words, one script can be used to generate a menu for icewm, pekwm, and openbox with an identical or nearly identical set of features and layout in each WM. This is accomplished by reading the name the script was executed as to set an environment variable and so tell the script which set of functions to load.

Also of interest is that the scripts are re-locatable, with the provisos that the main config files are in /etc/wmpipe and the relative locations of the scripts and function libraries are maintained. In other words, you can move the scripts from /foo/bin to /bar/bin just so long as you also move the shell function files in /foo/lib/wmpipe to /bar/lib/wmpipe.

Contents