The Smileotron: quickly add a custom smilie to a post.

johnraff · 2011-09-04 05:42:49

If you can't find the exact smilie you need on the list at the top of your input box, or (sacrilege vYTZ5aA ) want a yellow one... You can quickly paste one into a forum post with this script.

setup: You need the utilities feh curl & xsel. They're all small and handy things to have, and in the repositories. Copy the code into a file eg smilies.sh, make it executable and tie it to a keybinding in rc.xml. Make a folder for your smilies, put some smiley images there (jpg, gif or png for the web, and make them fairly small), and edit the top of smileys.sh to the true path to your smileys folder.

usage: Hit the keyboard shortcut you set, click a smiley in the window that comes up, hit "Enter", then paste the BBC code into your forum post with the middle mouse button. That's it. (To cancel, just close the feh window.)

#!/bin/bash
## choose an image file from a folder and get its ompload url + bbcode to paste.
## Dependencies: feh curl xsel 

SMILEY_DIR="$HOME/images/smilies" # set your folder for smileys (and put some there)

[[ -d $SMILEY_DIR ]] || { echo "$0: $SMILEY_DIR no such directory" >&2; exit 1;}

[[ $1 = --load ]] || {
    exec feh -t "$SMILEY_DIR" --quiet --title 'Choose a smiley (click, then press enter)' --index-name no --image-bg black --action "$0 --load %n;"
    exit
}

####################################################

# if "--load" option passed, upload image to omploader (if necessary) and print out url

file="$SMILEY_DIR/$2"
[[ $(feh -U "$file") ]] || { echo "$0: $2 no such image file in $SMILEY_DIR" >&2; exit 1;}
[[ -f ${file}.url ]] || {
    curl --silent -F file1=@"$file" http://ompldr.org/upload|awk 'BEGIN{RS="<div class=\"left\">";FS="<\/div>"}/File:/{gsub(/<[^>]+>/,"",$2);printf "%s",$2}' > "${file}.url"
}

# uncomment end of next line to use clipboard instead of selection
printf '[img]%s[/img]' "$(<"${file}.url")" | xsel --input #--clipboard
pkill -f "feh -t $SMILEY_DIR"
exit

If you'd rather paste with Ctrl+V than the middle mouse button, edit the xsel options at the bottom of the script.

How it works: Feh has a "thumbnails" option - if you click one of the thumbnails in the window it opens a new one with that image (very small so you might not notice it). When you hit Enter feh runs a custom "action" which in this case reruns the script to check the image for a filename.url file. If it finds one, that url gets put into the primary selection (or, optionally, clipboard) to paste. If there's no url file the image gets uploaded to omploader and the returned url written into a file for next time, so we don't spam out omploader. Finally the original feh window has to be closed, with pkill not killall in case there's a different feh process also running (wallpaper?).

vYTZ5aw

Last edited by johnraff (2011-09-09 04:05:30)

johnraff · 2011-09-09 04:14:05

Added a few extra notes, and gave it a name.

Been using this a few days now and it seems to do the job OK. Only mild annoyance is having to press enter as well as clicking the image. I can't think of any way to cut out that extra step. Maybe now Openbox supports icons a pipe menu might be possible?

anthony · 2011-11-23 03:27:02

It would be nice to be able to perform an 'action' in the thumbnail window

Perhaps montage and index modes could report the image selected with the mouse 'action', where thumbnail mode 'opens' the image.

I have also been looking for some image viewer that can report locations of user 'mouse clicks' in the window.

Some type of 'remote control' such as "gqview" and "display" (from Imagemagick) would also be very useful!

Last edited by anthony (2011-11-28 01:41:24)

johnraff · 2011-11-25 16:27:25

@anthony yes it would be nice if you could call your custom action directly from the thumbnail window, saving a click, but that's all feh has to offer as far as I can tell.

What do you mean by "remote control"?

anthony · 2011-11-28 01:39:10

Some client programs let you run them with a --remote option. This mean instead of opening a new window, look for an already running window and pass the arguments to it. A technique netscape originally developed, for remote control of the currently viewed web page.

For example "display -remote" (from ImageMagick) will let you replace the currently viewed image with a new one without having to close and restart the application.

The USR1 signal for "feh" is one such 'remote control', making it useful for interactive scripts. What is really lacking in image display programs is better feedback from such applications (image finished loading and is now displayed, or user clicks in image)

I wrote up a few notes on image remote control, on the page
http://www.ict.griffith.edu.au/anthony/ … ontrol.txt

Last edited by anthony (2011-11-28 01:40:08)