More flexibility with config-blocks (i.e. more than just the two)

[D-Vaillant]

I've been implementing this at https://github.com/D-Vaillant/j4-make-config/tree/class but I wanted to have a forum for design feedback. For the sake of efficiency I've chosen to force all of the config block markers start with # $i3- (fixed in the PREFIX variable) so that we can pluck them out by just checking for PREFIX in line.

Some thoughts:

• Do we want to require that the prefix starts with a # or is it better to prepend it automatically?

• Are we concerned about more than one #s?

• If we want to use $i3- as the config-block marker prefix we might not want to erase it if there's no corresponding config-block, on the off-chance that somebody out there has it has some title or something. That could probably be a configuration option. Very low priority.

[lasers]

• Maybe we check if the prefix starts with # to be explicit... so users can use ### $i3-theme if they want to... and is less dirty this way. If they don't include #, they will learn really fast... Thanks to i3 config parser or we can add # ourselves. Maybe it is better to keep # $i3- hardcoded so we don't introduce silliness and/or prefix headaches... since I assume we'll have to keep specifying it in the optional parameters.

• See above. I think if we add a prefix, we use it... so # would not matter. Prefix matters.

• We probably shouldn't erase them in first place... meaning we would see # $i3-theme-window in the config too... right on top of the concatenated code. Optionally, we could remove $ to see # i3-theme-window instead.

  • I think we won't have problem with line.startswith(prefix) instead of prefix in line... and I can't see how users can have some titles or something that makes them write # $i3-. Commenting out aliases and exec would give us set $i3 --> # set $i3... and exec $i3 --> # exec $i3 so maybe we're good here.

My thoughts.

EDIT: P.S. I looked at your class branch.

class: ./j4-make-config --list-themes
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./j4-make-config", line 320, in <module>
    printThemeList()
NameError: name 'printThemeList' is not defined

[D-Vaillant]

Oh, the class branch is a nightmare factory right now. The commits I just pushed make it work without immediately breaking but I haven't even really tested it with non-standard block names.

The ability to let people add multiple #'s is a good idea. I was thinking of using split('#'). Something like:

def foo(name="\t\t###!### $my-prefixfooblockcfgname"):
    # we can use a try/except block to filter out lines without the prefix
    head, blockconfigname = name.split(PREFIX)  # =["\t\t###!###", "fooblockcfgname"]
    # we can throw in an try/except block here to check if we don't have a '#'
    whitespace, tail = head.split('#')  # =["\t\t", a mess of strings]
    tail = '#' + ''.join(tail)

Right now it doesn't distinguish between the leading whitespace and any other leading character, so additional #'s end up commenting out the block. And this might break if someone uses PREFIX more than once in a line (which they shouldn't, but when it happens it just moves on.) It shouldn't be a difficult change for the # thing but it's fairly low priority for me right now.

I like the idea of preserving the block headers so I just added them back in. This has the upside of preserving any line that looks like a block header but doesn't have any blocks associated with it.

I changed the prefix in line to line.startswith(prefix) for j4Config. Makes more sense, cleaner.

[lasers]

@okraits ?

[okraits]

I'm busy right now with RL and other projects but I'm trying to have a look in the next days.