Creating a new watcher

I would like to watch one integer variable from my window-manager (XY context : the virtual desktop I am in, as they are a good classification of the activities I do on the computer + makes it trivial to label current activity, by just moving to the corresponding space).

What would be a bare-bones watcher ?

Only has to run on linux. I can have the watched-thing run a shell command (messaging the watcher) every time its value changes, so it doesn’t even have to continuously listen (though if it must listen, it can watch the /tmp/current-value file, easy).

[nikanar]

@rhabbachi Not that I can remember. I think it boils down to the following

will@ker:~$ cat .../AW/aw-wmtag.py

#!/usr/bin/python3

import subprocess
import time, datetime
from aw_client import ActivityWatchClient
from aw_core.models import Event

def main():
    client = ActivityWatchClient("aw-wmtag")
    bucket_id = "{}_{}".format(client.name, client.hostname)  # Give your bucket a unique id.
    event_type = "activedesktop"  # Used to annotate what kind of data the events in a given bucket will contain.
    client.create_bucket(bucket_id, event_type)

    poll_time = 5  # Send an event every 5 seconds
    with client:
        while True:
            data = {"desktop": get_the_watched_thing()}
            now = datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc)
            awesome_event = Event(timestamp=now, data=data)
            client.heartbeat(bucket_id, awesome_event, pulsetime=poll_time+1, queued=True)
            time.sleep(poll_time)
        
def get_the_watched_thing():
    filename = "/path/to/awesome-logging.log"
    f = subprocess.Popen(['tail','-c','2',filename],
                         stdout=subprocess.PIPE,stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
    value = int(f.stdout.read(1))
    # print("Looking at {} says desktop is currently {}".format(filename, value))
    return value
    
if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

… given that the window manager (awesome-wm) writes in /path/to/awesome-logging.log, with the following (excerpt from ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua):

local function log_current_tag()
   local i = awful.screen.focused().selected_tag.index
   file = io.open("/path/to/awesome-logging.log", "a")
   file:write(string.format("%s Switching to awesome tag %i\n", os.date("%Y/%m/%d %X"), i))
   file:close()
end

and then calling that function whenever I change tags (by whatever keybinding or clicking sequence) = user input changes the observed value - e.g.

   awful.key({modkey},	"Tab", function () awful.tag.viewnext() log_current_tag() end),

There, now it’s done 😂

[ErikBjare]

@nikanar Awesome! Great to see you got it working 😄

Huge thanks for helping us make the process a bit less cumbersome for people in the future. I updated the doc to mention the PIP_USER trick as you suggested.

Closing this for now, but don’t hesitate to let us know how things turn out 🚀