| Portability | unportable |
|---|---|
| Stability | unstable |
| Maintainer | Gwern Branwen <gwern0@gmail.com> |
XMonad.Util.XSelection
Contents
Description
A module for accessing and manipulating X Window's mouse selection (the buffer used in copy and pasting).
getSelection and putSelection are adaptations of Hxsel.hs and Hxput.hs from the XMonad-utils, available:
$ darcs get <http://gorgias.mine.nu/repos/xmonad-utils>
- getSelection :: MonadIO m => m String
- promptSelection :: String -> X ()
- safePromptSelection :: String -> X ()
- transformPromptSelection :: (String -> String) -> String -> X ()
- transformSafePromptSelection :: (String -> String) -> String -> X ()
- putSelection :: MonadIO m => String -> m ()
Usage
Add import XMonad.Util.XSelection to the top of Config.hs
Then make use of getSelection or promptSelection as needed; if
one wanted to run Firefox with the selection as an argument (perhaps
the selection string is an URL you just highlighted), then one could add
to the xmonad.hs a line like thus:
, ((modm .|. shiftMask, xK_b), promptSelection "firefox")
There are a number of known problems with XSelection:
- Unicode handling is busted. But it's still better than calling
chrto translate to ASCII, at least. As near as I can tell, the mangling happens when the String is outputted somewhere, such as via promptSelection's passing through the shell, or GHCi printing to the terminal. utf-string has IO functions which can fix this, though I do not know have to use them here. It's a complex issue; see http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/xmonad/2007-September/001967.html and http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/xmonad/2007-September/001966.html. - Needs more elaborate functionality: Emacs' registers are nice; if you don't know what they are, see http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Registers.html#Registers
getSelection :: MonadIO m => m StringSource
Returns a String corresponding to the current mouse selection in X; if there is none, an empty string is returned. Note that this is really only reliable for ASCII text and currently escapes or otherwise mangles more complex UTF-8 characters.
promptSelection :: String -> X ()Source
safePromptSelection :: String -> X ()Source
A wrapper around getSelection. Makes it convenient to run a program with the current selection as an argument.
This is convenient for handling URLs, in particular. For example, in your Config.hs you could bind a key to
promptSelection "firefox";
this would allow you to highlight a URL string and then immediately open it up in Firefox.
promptSelection passes strings through the system shell, /bin/sh; if you do not wish your selected text
to be interpreted or mangled by the shell, use safePromptSelection. safePromptSelection will bypass the
shell using safeSpawn from XMonad.Util.Run; see its documentation for more
details on the advantages and disadvantages of using safeSpawn.
transformSafePromptSelection :: (String -> String) -> String -> X ()Source
A wrapper around promptSelection and its safe variant. They take two parameters, the first is a function that transforms strings, and the second is the application to run. The transformer essentially transforms the selection in X.
One example is to wrap code, such as a command line action copied out of the browser to be run as sudo ++ cmd or su - -c "++ cmd ++".
putSelection :: MonadIO m => String -> m ()Source
Set the current X Selection to a specified string.