Re: Making scripts with sawfish-client

["Eric Mangold" <teratorn world-net net>]

On Thu, 13 Apr 2006 19:42:28 +1000, Damien Clauzel <dclauzel aup fr> wrote:

> Le jeu 13 avr 2006 10:24:25 CEST, "Eric Mangold"  
> <teratorn world-net net> a
> �it :
>
> > You'll want to consult the API documentation.
> >
> > http://home.blarg.net/~sand/sawfish/
> >
> > And the man page for sawfish-client should explain how to run Lisp  
> > inside
> > sawfish.
> >
> > Feel free to come back with specific questions regarding sawfish, the  
> > API
> > docs, etc.
> Yeaaaaah. Sure. As you can imagine, the first things that I have done  
> was to
> look at the documentation and search the web for examples.

Actually I imagined that you hadn't done much of anything.

All you said was that you couldn't find any examples. So I assumed you did  
a couple searches. It's a practical working assumption considering the  
average level of work people put in before asking for technical help on  
public forums. Sad but true.

> Maybe I was unlucky, but I couldn't find any sample code using
> sawfish-client. And the documentation is strictly developer oriented.

What do you mean "sample code using sawfish-client"? If you're talking  
about programming sawfish, then you're simply talking about librep, a Lisp  
dialect (or the C API). You can use sawfish-client to run Lisp forms -  
nothing special about that. I take it you've read the man page.

> We are not in a developer point of view here, but into a user one.

Sorry, I disagree.

> We don't
> want to develop for sawfish, we want to use it in its simplest way:
> switch to
> another desktop, create a new one, etc. It seems to me that there is no
> practical documentation for this project, so the complexity for  
> newcomers is
> to high.

Zero practical documentation. Right. Maybe you would like to rephrase that?

> In our case, what we need is a clear documentation about how to use the
> tools. That means tutorials and howto, and not an API list (that will be
> maybe useful, but later).

There isn't much in the way of developer guides, tutorials, or HOWTOs.  
What exactly would you even write them about?

I've never seen this question asked before, and yet there are stacks of  
3rd party extensions written for sawfish:
http://sawfish.endorphin.org/SawfishWiki/SawfishWikiLibrary

There really isn't much special about sawfish. If you want Lisp HOWTOs,  
there are plenty of those. Need help understanding event-driven, or  
asynchronous programming? Plenty of literature in that domain.

Just get your hands dirty. Experiment, find relavant APIs, try things at  
the REPL, and have fun.

And last but not least, read this:  
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

-Eric