Recently I got a bit fed up with my XMonad configuration and decided to add some of the missing bits. After all I made the switch with productivity in mind so it would be silly to endure even the slightest tradeoffs. If you don’t know what XMonad is – it’s an extremely customizable tiling window manager – the default configuration is, however, pretty crude, so it doesn’t really make sense to switch if you’re not going to tweak it, even if just slightly.
To the point – one of the things I was missing was the ability to open a new terminal emulator window in the same working directory as the one I had focused. I felt that existing solutions such as the WorkspaceDir extension were lacking and not exactly what I was looking for. And so I had to write one myself. Since I figured I couldn’t be the only one in need I decided I’d share my snippet.
The Code
The solution involves overriding the “new terminal” binding and changing the directory to focused window’s CWD. In order to do so we have to extract it first – depending on what OS you are sitting on the actual script may vary – so just for the record, the script shown below was written for a Linux-based distro, although it should work on other operating systems with a proper /proc filesystem too.
- Add key binding – note, I’m using EZConfig here
("S-M-<Return>", mkTerm)
{:start="2”} 2. Add terminal launcher
mkTerm = withWindowSet launchTerminal
launchTerminal ws = case peek ws of
Nothing -> runInTerm "" "$SHELL"
Just xid -> terminalInCwd xid
{:start="3”} 3. Detect current working directory of focused window. You may need a different way of obtaining the CWD from PID if not on Linux (I was being lazy, sorry).
terminalInCwd xid = let
hex = showHex xid " "
shInCwd = "'cd $(readlink /proc/$(ps --ppid $(xprop -id 0x" ++ hex
++ "_NET_WM_PID | cut -d\" \" -f3) -o pid= | tr -d \" \")/cwd) && $SHELL'"
in runInTerm "" $ "sh -c " ++ shInCwd
{:start="4”} 4. Last but not least – make sure to add missing imports
import Numeric
import XMonad.Core
import XMonad.StackSet
import XMonad.Util.Run
That’s it
From now on you can let your fingers rest a bit more – enjoy! And make sure to plan carefully what you’re going to do with the time saved as well!
As usual, if you want to have a closer look at a config actually using this it’s avaialable as part of my dotfiles repo.