[Notion-devel] Notion update: flux!

[Arnout E. <no...@bz...>]

Hello Notion enthousiasts,

For those not following irc (#notion on freenode) and/or the commits-lists, 
let me get you up to speed about some interesting stuff that has been happening
recently.

- libextl: 
  - lua5.2 support has been added, many thanks to Philipp Hartwig for his 
    help. This was quite a bit harder than anticipated. Notion still used 
    'arg' for parameters passed to scripts. This was deprecated in 5.1 and 
    dropped in 5.2, so we switched to the {...} notation now.
  - Return values of scripts were ignored (this seems to have worked at some 
    time in the past, but this must have been before we adopted libextl). This
    functionality has been restored.

- git submodules
  - libtu, libextl and several modules have now been set up as git submodules
    of the main notion repository. This introduces some extra ceremony in 
    development, but in general should make it easier to check out latest git 
    and get started quickly.

- notionflux
  - insert notion scripts into notion from the commandline! This enables some
    interesting features/flexibility, such as:
    - A user asked if he could configure notion to switch workspaces by 
      bumping the mouse against the sides of his screen. This can now be 
      easily done by creating a small script that does:

         notionflux -e "notioncore.find_screen_id(0):switch_prev()"

      and then registering:

         xdotool behave_screen_edge --quiesce 100 --delay 100 left exec notion_prevws.sh
         xdotool behave_screen_edge --quiesce 100 --delay 100 right exec notion_nextws.sh

      I'm not sure many users would like such behavior, but it's cool that it
      can be achieved quite easily.
  - Thanks to the return value fix in libextl mentioned above, notionflux will
    again show the return value of the script as output.

- maximization
  - Philipp Hartwig has been working on some improvements to the maximization
    code. Not merged into the official notion git yet, but if you're interested
    check out his branch at https://github.com/AopicieR/notion_aopicier

- regression testing
  - 'Xdummy' in combination with notionflux allow us to start a dummy X server
    in the background, start notion inside it, manipulate its internals with
    lua, and verify it behaves as intended. Hopefully this will help us ensure
    future changes don't break existing fixes/features, and perhaps even aid 
    in quicker 'tdd-ish' development. 

Kind regards,

Arnout