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XMonad.Util.XSelection

Portability | unportable
Stability | unstable
Maintainer | Gwern Branwen <gwern0@gmail.com>

Contents

Usage

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>

Synopsis

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 chr to 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 String | Source

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.

transformPromptSelection :: (String -> String) -> String -> X () | Source

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.
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