Howm Version 0.5

I've decided that I want to do write ups of new releases of software that I create, in order to gather my thoughts and share some extra information with those that are interested.

With that said, I have just released a new version of howm. Version 0.5 brings some of the biggest changes to howm, including:

• Configuration is done through cottage.
• Howm no longer requires recompiling.
• sxhkd is used for handling keypresses.

Why?

Why go to the effort of 106 commits, spanning 2 months? When I first created howm I just wanted something fun to hack on and hadn't considered the architecture particularly. When I first shared howm on Hacker News and also reddit I began to realise that recompiling after each configuration change wasn't going to cut it. I also realised that scripting howm was an important idea.

This led me to write cottage - a small utility to allow users to run howm commands over a local UNIX socket. This idea flourished as I realised that configuration should be moved out of howm also.

Configuration

Howm is now configured using cottage. The syntax is easy to understand (you don't need to understand C to make changes to howm anymore) and you're told when you make an error. Here's an example that shows how to change the border width:

    cottage -c border_px 4

By collecting multiple cottage commands together, it is possible to create a configuration file in the form of a shell script. This is heavily inspired by baskerville's bspwm, but takes the idea further by adding more descriptive error messages when something goes wrong.

Keybindings

Keeping a config.h file crammed with keybindings felt archaic, so I decided to switch over to using sxhkd. sxhkd listens for keypresses and then runs predefined commands. Joining sxhkd together with cottage allows for keybinding logic to be removed from howm - instead allowing all commands to be passed through a UNIX socket. This means that there is no longer a distinction between commands sent by cottage over the UNIX socket and commands resulting from keypresses.

Future Releases 

As more howm releases are made, I have a list of features that I want to see incorporated. Here's a brief summary of them:

• Unit testing: I want most of howm to be covered by unit tests.
• Cottage query howm's state: I think it would be great to be able to see howm's configuration as it is running. I also want to prevent people from having to hack shellscripts around howm's ugly output - cottage should be able to tell you everything you need to know.
• Visual Mode: Being able to select certain windows and then perform an operation upon them would be excellent.
• Better mouse support: The ability to move and resize windows using the mouse is a feature that howm should have.

 Conclusion

I hope that people enjoy the new features and new way of doing things with howm. I understand that some people may not like the addition of extra dependencies - but the move away from recompiling after a configuration change has removed howm's depencies on a compiler and working build system.