cmapyopc / shellfutures

fire a launcher. write `x <shell command>`. when the command competes, receive the output as notification.

shellfutures

poor men's asynchronous shell

Motivation

fire a launcher. write x <command>. when the command completes, receive the output as notification.

In a few more words: Assuming you run a window manager (dwm recommended) and love to work on a shell but hate to fire a terminal-emulator just to type a command, view the output and close again. It is too much key strokes, it is annoying to go away from the window you are currently working on (e.g. browser) and it's annoying to be blocked waiting until the command returns (while you could go on browsing or editing or whatever).

Here comes shellfutures. Think of it as a subscription to the output of a command. I invoke it as x from dmenu which is bound to alt-p in my dwm. It evals what I provide as command + arguments and when done presents me stdout/stderr in a notification (dunst on my end). Another good think -- you can close the notification or it just takes care of itself and expires, unlike a terminal; or it adheres to whatever notification policy you have.

You might even want a keybinding in dwm to something like x $(alias|cut -d= -f1|dmenu) to save a keystroke of typing x. I don't :o)

Too much words for effectively 10 LOC.

Take a look, adjust to your environment and likings and enjoy.

Usage

1. fire a launcher (e.g. alt-p in dwm)
2. write 'x' (or the name of the SHELLFUTURES executable if changed) followed by the shell command, e.g. x ll or x lynx -dump -nolinks -nonumbers reddit.com
3. if the command takes longer to execute, you can continue undisturbed your workflow
4. after the command is completed, its output is shown in a notification window

Dependencies

• notify-send; you may want to use dzen2 or similar instead
• traditional UNIX userland