== A new building block of my environment: dmenu

[[Nick Coleman http://www.nickcoleman.org/]]'s comment on [[my
last tools entry ToolsPyhosts]] introduced me on to [[dmenu
http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/]], which has rapidly become an
important component of my environment. The basics of [[dmenu]] are
described nicely in Nick's comment, but I do two unconventional things
with it.

The first is that I drastically restrict dmenu's command completion.
The 'standard' dmenu setup has it doing command completion on everything
in your _$PATH_. After trying this briefly, I rapidly came to the
conclusion that it made no sense and only created clutter. There's only
a few X programs that I run frequently (and most of the things on my
_$PATH_ need to be run in a terminal anyways), and it is much simpler
and less cluttered to list them explicitly. Explicitly controlling
dmenu's command completion also lets me list my most frequent program
first, so that it takes two keystrokes to start it (dmenu starts with
the first entry in the command list selected).

The main unconventional thing I do is that I use dmenu not so much to
run commands but to provide abbreviations for things that I do very
frequently. Some of these things are themselves commands, such as [[my
test Firefox environment ../linux/IsolatingFirefox]]. Some of these
things are done by small helper scripts, such as a script that uses
[[Firefox remote control ../unix/MyFirefoxRemoteControl]] to run a
Google search on its command line arguments; a similar script runs a
search on our internal system documentation.

(These helper scripts have deliberately short names, usually single
letters, and so are not in my normal _$PATH_. My dmenu frontend adds
their directory, actually several directories, to _$PATH_.)

But a lot of the things I do a lot don't fit in the command model,
so I handle them directly with heuristics in the driver script. Some
examples:

* if I type the name of an internal machine, I want to run an [[sshterm
  ToolsSshterm]] to it.
* '@<machine name>' means a root sshterm to that machine
* the name of an external machine or anything matching ((*.*/*)) is
  taken as a URL and handed to Firefox through remote control.
* I have brief abbreviations for a number of websites that I visit
  frequently (mechanically these are implemented as little scripts
  using Firefox remote control on fixed urls).

The result of all of this hackery works extremely well for me. Although
I only started using dmenu a few months ago, it has already become an
essential and reflexive part of my desktop environment and it's well
on the way to supplanting various previously heavily used parts of my
environment, to some extent including [[pyhosts itself ToolsPyhosts]].

(This is all the more startling to me because my desktop environment
tends to change only slowly and rarely. Rapid revolutions are quite
rare, although not unknown; sometimes when I fall in love with things
I *really* fall in love with them.)