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clawe refactor notes

Created: Aug 09, 2022Published: Nov 01, 2022Last modified: Apr 05, 2023
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Word count: 122Backlinks: 4
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I refactored most of clawe last week (early august 2022).

It'd be good to capture what happened and why, and to share that as a post.

some raw:

clawe clients need def backing (persisted) so that i can:

  • write/edit toggle-app-scratchpad clients
  • app-names for matching
  • init-defs for starting apps with specific inputs

just a name gets you pretty far, b/c you can sync across apps for workspaces

(emacs, tmux) to get re-openable state - useful when moving between contexts to

re-open a workspace just as you left it

bb-cli unlocks some strong apis that i can bake inputs of into the config, and

also easily test on the command line. it's already been a treat for

clawe.toggle/toggle-app


Backlinks

clawe's debug namespace via bb-cli

babashka/cli 's -x feature plus arg coercion lets you call arbitrary

functions in your scripts with well formed inputs. It's an excellent

combination, and spurred a clawe refactor (re-achitecture) that I hope to write

up soon. (Though I do have a brief bb-cli note here.)

For today, just want to share a piece of the new structure: clawe.debug/ls and clawe.debug/ls-print.

When debugging clawe, especially clawe's toggle feature, I often need to get a look at the workspaces and clients that are currently running - specifically the names, window titles, class names, etc, which are used to match with client/workspace definitions. When you invoke toggle for "spotify", clawe determines the current need. Are we already focusing spotify? Does the client exist in a different workspace? When this goes wrong, we need to figure out why.

The debug namespace is a quick way to list the clients or workspaces that clawe knows about - (clawe.debug/ls {:type :clients}) in a repl is simple and quite useful.

But sometimes you're not in a clojure repl, or you want to know what a fresh invokation of clawe would see. Maybe the repl state has some advantage or difference from the actual toggle invokation that your keybinding is sending.

> This is especially true for clawe, as I like to develop it against the > fully-featured jvm cider repl (against doctor 's backend server) rather than a > basic bb-repl. This supports extremely useful features like cider-inspect, > and makes clojure development a real joy.

Fortunately, bb-cli's -x lets us invoke the exact command on the command line:

> alias clawebb='bb --config ~/russmatney/clawe/bb.edn'
> clawebb -x clawe.debug/ls-print --type :clients

|           :client/window-title | :client/app-name |
|--------------------------------+------------------|
|                          clawe |        alacritty |
|                          clawe |            emacs |
|                           dino |            emacs |
|                       dotfiles |            emacs |
|            tauri-doctor-topbar |            clove |
|                        journal |            emacs |
|             slack | clojurians |            slack |
|                        spotify |          spotify |
| babashka/cli — mozilla firefox |          firefox |

There we are! We can see that the spotify client is found and properly labelled.

Note that here we're calling ls-print instead, which is a simple wrapper that passes the ls results to clojure.pprint/print-table.

---

A few weeks after this implementation, I started toying with nextjournal/clerk,

and it was a delight to find that clawe.debug/ls can feed directly into

clerk/table, which led to this tiny tmux status notebook:

(ns notebooks.tmux
  {:nextjournal.clerk/visibility {:code :hide :result :show}}
  (:require
   [clawe.debug :as debug]
   [nextjournal.clerk :as clerk]))

;; ### tmux sessions
^::clerk/no-cache
(clerk/table (debug/ls {:type :tmux}))

;; ### tmux panes
^::clerk/no-cache
(clerk/table (debug/ls {:type :tmux-panes}))

---

Another piece of the clawe refactor: Clawe now invokes its keybindings by default with -x.

;; from clawe/defs/bindings.clj
(defkbd toggle-terminal
  [[:mod] "Return"]
  (sxhkd-exec "bb --config ~/russmatney/clawe/bb.edn -x clawe.toggle/toggle --key terminal"))

(defkbd toggle-emacs
  [[:mod :shift] "Return"]
  (sxhkd-exec "bb --config ~/russmatney/clawe/bb.edn -x clawe.toggle/toggle --key emacs"))

(defkbd toggle-workspace-journal
  [[:mod] "u"]
  (sxhkd-exec "bb --config ~/russmatney/clawe/bb.edn -x clawe.toggle/toggle --key journal"))

(defkbd toggle-workspace-web
  [[:mod] "t"]
  (sxhkd-exec "bb --config ~/russmatney/clawe/bb.edn -x clawe.toggle/toggle --key web"))

Prior to this, I was using a defthing macro to register commands, and invoking them by passing the name into clawe's main function.

This change simplified the architecture by completely removing that registry,

and has the added benefit of making it very simple to reproduce an invokation -

you can just invoke it yourself:

bb --config ~/russmatney/clawe/bb.edn -x clawe.toggle/toggle --key journal

This ends up being more performant as well - there's no need to require every namespace in clawe to call one command. When invoked via -x, only the required namespaces are loaded, so we get to the good bits right away.

---

For more on Clawe's features and design journey, check out the clawe workspace note.

2022-08-09

insights and aha moments

Aha! moments - moments of insight that unlock the clarity and confidence while designing and implementing something.

The goal of a Hammock or Procrastination session.

Worth capturing!

bb cli refactor

babashka/cli is a few input arg parsers/coercers and babashka features ( -x my-ns/my-func ) that make it dead simple to call a clojure function with coerced args on the command line.

I just refactored my clawe app-toggle on osx, and it's now just one function

called with a bunch of different args in my yabai keybindings:

# emacs, term toggling
shift + cmd - return : bb --config ~/russmatney/clawe/bb.edn -x clawe.toggle/toggle-app --client emacs --app Emacs
cmd - return : bb --config ~/russmatney/clawe/bb.edn -x clawe.toggle/toggle-app --client terminal --app Alacritty

cmd - u : bb --config ~/russmatney/clawe/bb.edn -x clawe.toggle/toggle-app --wsp journal --title journal --app Emacs
cmd - t : bb --config ~/russmatney/clawe/bb.edn -x clawe.toggle/toggle-app --wsp web --app Safari
cmd - b : bb --config ~/russmatney/clawe/bb.edn -x clawe.toggle/toggle-app --wsp devweb --app "Firefox Developer Edition"
cmd - s : bb --config ~/russmatney/clawe/bb.edn -x clawe.toggle/toggle-app --wsp spotify --app Spotify
cmd - e : bb --config ~/russmatney/clawe/bb.edn -x clawe.toggle/toggle-app --wsp aseprite --app Aseprite
cmd - a : bb --config ~/russmatney/clawe/bb.edn -x clawe.toggle/toggle-app --wsp slack --app Slack
cmd - m : bb --config ~/russmatney/clawe/bb.edn -x clawe.toggle/toggle-app --wsp messages --app Messages
cmd - g : bb --config ~/russmatney/clawe/bb.edn -x clawe.toggle/toggle-app --wsp godot --app Godot

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