22/02/2010

The XUL challenge

What if I could throw away all ( I say all but really I use a terminal and firefox and thats about it... ) the apps I use and find alternatives that work with XUL ( with or without firefox I dont really mind ). Im already running my email, calendar, rss reader and music from firefox tabs... The trouble is in my terminal ill run vim, irssi and do whatever file managing I need to do in there too.

One solution might be to write a curses lib ontop of canvas then run a shell as usual... Iv already written a term in python so this cant be much harder! Trouble here is that there is no way to run a process and read/write to its stdin/out in firefox/XUL apps. If I could get pyxpcom to work it would be easy...

The other, possibly better solution, is to start using something like bespin ( which unfortunatly is in the middle of a rewrite and not useable yet ). I wouldnt mind using that if I could make it very vim like. I could probably use it to do some simple file management too. That would just leave irssi... chatzilla? "meh"

I would find it most amusing to run firefox in my .xinit and have no window manager... we shall see.