gx

gx is a utility inspired by the plan9 plumber and suckless utilities.

Building

gx depends on the unix version of plan9's regex library. Other than that:

make && sudo make install

port

port is a script that dissassociates interfaces from implementations. This allows you to register multiple implementations for a given interface, and makes it easier to use in a multi-user environment.

#!/bin/sh
op="$1"
shift 1
case "$op" in
	web)
		firefox "$@" &
		;;
	edit)
		st vim $@ &
		;;
esac

This routes web actions to firefox, and edits to vim running in st.

config.h

gx uses X macros to simplify the development, so each line but the last must have a \ as the last character. X lines define regular expressions that must match the input on stdin, then the following Y line specifies the command to run. Note that the X lines must match the input in it's entirety, or it doesn't count as a match. Also, if a backslash is needed to escape a character, it must be doubled so as to escape the c string parsing. The Y line can use \\n where n is a digit to specify a sub match to be interpolated. \\0 matches the entire regex (so the entire input), while \\1 matches from the leftmost parenthese to it's closing pair.

Example:

#define TABLE \
	X("https?://.+") \
	Y("port web \\0") \
	X("#include \"([a-zA-Z0-9]+\\.h)\"") \
	Y("port edit \\1")

When presented with a http or https url, it runs the web port to open it, and when presented with an include directive, it will open the edit port on the file. This is meant to be run, among other ways, inside vim or vis to better utilize linux and dwm as an ide.

Features

Note that if the last character in the input is a newline, it doesn't have to be matched. There are limits to the number of matches (8) and the length of the input (1023 bytes) and the regex-interpolated command to run (4095 bytes). If you don't like them, you can edit them in the source.

dwm

To aid in incorporating this with dwm, there is a script, dwmgx that pipes the primary selection to gx. It can be added to your dwm config.h

st

To incorporate this into st, a patch is provided called simple_plumb.diff. This sends the currently selected text in st is sent to the plumber as a parameter on right click.