Re: Configuration file rewrite

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Sime Ramov once stated:
> Hello,
> 
> I only recently started learning Lua and I am amazed. Unfortunately, I
> am not a programmer, so I fail to take bigger advantage of the language.
> 
> First task I set to myself was to rewrite herbstluftwm[1] configuration
> file from shell to Lua.
> 
> herbstluftwm is a nice window manager, configured at runtime via ipc
> calls from `herbstclient`.
> 
> While I managed to rewrite the configuration file, that's all I did, a
> line by line rewrite of the shell code. There is nothing advanced or
> elegant about it. I haven't actually solved any problems.
> 
> Here is the file: http://dl.ramov.com/herbstluftwm.lua
> 
> Any ideas to make it better, i.e. maybe some clever use of tables or
> some higher order functions etc?

  I would construct the configuration file as:

-----[ hc.conf ]-----------------

set =
{
  always_show_frame         = 0,
  default_frame_layout      = 2,
  frame_bg_transparent      = 1,
  frame_broder_active_color = '#262626',
  -- ... 
}

keybindings =
{
  ['Mod1-q']		= 'quit',
  ['Mod1-Shift-r']	= 'reload',
  ['Mod1-Shift-c']	= 'close',
  
  -- Layout

  ['Mod1-r']		= 'remove',
  ['Mod1-space']	= 'cycle_layout 1',

}

mousebindings = 
{
  -- ... 
}

-- etc.

  I think this looks better, and is simpler to understand than wrapping
everything in calls to a function.  Then, have another file to actually load
and process this file:

-----[ runme.lua ]-----------------------------

dofile("hc.conf")

for _,section in ipairs { 'set' , 'keybindings' , 'mousebindings' } do
  for name,value in pairs(section) do
    os.execute(string.format("herbstclient %s %s",name,tostring(value)))
  end
end

  Even better, modify the window manager to load and process the Lua file
directly.  

  -spc (Who recently converted a program to use Lua for configuration [1])

[1]	http://boston.conman.org/2011/11/28