Daily Shaarli
September 8, 2021
i3ipc-python is a library for controlling i3 window manager and sway. i3 users can use this library to create their own plugin scripts to customize their desktop or integrate i3 into other applications. With this library, you can query the state of the window manager, listen to events, and send commands to i3 to perform window manager actions such as focusing or closing windows.
The main entry point into the features of the library is the Connection class. This class manages a Unix socket connection to the ipc interface exposed by the window manager. By default, the Connection will attempt to connect to the running instance of i3 by using information present in the environment or the running X11 display.
The CoMatrix project enables the usage of the Matrix protocol (more precisely Matrix Client-Server API [0]) for constrained IoT devices via CoAP [1] and CBOR [2] in a constrained network (e.g. a 802.15.4/6LoWPAN network [3]).
The architecture of the Matrix protocol is based on HTTP/REST/JSON/TLS and is therefore not suitable for constrained devices. CoMatrix provides a gateway, which ports Matrix to CoAP/CBOR/(DTLS). This gateway communicates with constrained IoT devices on one side via CoAP+CBOR and translates to the Matrix protocol on the other side (i.e. HTTP+JSON). We also provide a CoMatrix client library (for RIOT-OS [4]) which provides a starting point to implement CoAP clients (for constrained devices) which are able to interact with Matrix homeservers via the gateway.
Network booting is cool. Once you have setup everything you can stop juggling iso images in your virtual machine configs. Instead you just kick a network boot and pick whatever you want install from the boot menu delivered by the boot server.
This article is not about the basics of setting up a boot server. The internet has tons of tutorials on how to install a tftp server and how to boot your favorite OS from tftp. This article will focus on configuring network boot for libvirt-managed virtual machines.
i3's interprocess communication (or ipc) is the interface i3wm uses to receive commands from client applications such as i3-msg. It also features a publish/subscribe mechanism for notifying interested parties of window manager events.
i3ipc-python is a Python library for controlling the window manager. This project is intended to be useful for general scripting, and for applications that interact with the window manager like status line generators, notification daemons, and window pagers.
If you have an idea for a script to extend i3wm, you can add your script to the examples folder.
For details on how to use the library, see the reference documentation.
I have been using the awesome window manager for 10 years. It is a tiling window manager, configurable and extendable with the Lua language. Using a general-purpose programming language to configure every aspect is a double-edged sword. Due to laziness and the apparent difficulty of adapting my configuration—about 3000 lines—to newer releases, I was stuck with the 3.4 version, whose last release is from 2013.
It was time for a rewrite. Instead, I have switched to the i3 window manager, lured by the possibility to migrate to Wayland and Sway later with minimal pain. Using an embedded interpreter for configuration is not as important to me as it was in the past: it brings both complexity and brittleness.