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Mpd Song Title Length Handle

August 2021

Before this update to my AwesomeWM configuration (which is a clone from @elenapan’s config), the song title which the widget shows will crop.

I want to see the whole song title, to be honest.

So, let’s get started.

The fix

Initially, it was quite hard to build a method that updates the widget container to scroll the text because I hadn’t find a method that can get the rendered size of a textbox widget. After some digging in the API docs, I found that textbox:get_preferred_size(s) will actually give rendered size of a textbox then it’s string length.

Code change

First, we’ll change the original mpd_title child widget as an layouted container widget:

local mpd_title = wibox.widget{
    halign = "center",
    valign = "center",
    fill_horizontal = true,
    layout = wibox.container.place
}

Then add two widgets: a textbox widget, which contains the actual title text, and a scroll container contains the textbox widget:

local title_widget = wibox.widget{
    text = "---------",
    align = "center",
    valign = "center",
    widget = wibox.widget.textbox,
    font = "Noto Sans CJK TC Medium 14"
}
local rolling = wibox.widget{
    title_widget,
    step_function = wibox.container.scroll.step_functions.nonlinear_back_and_forth,
    speed = 50,
    fps = 60,
    layout = wibox.container.scroll.horizontal
}

Next, to the signal handler, we need to dynamically set what mpd_title will contain depending on the title_widget’s rendered size:

title_widget.markup =
    "<span foreground='" .. title_fg .."'>"
    .. title .. "</span>" -- Set title
local title_size = title_widget:get_preferred_size(1) -- Get rendered size
-- Dynamic widget setting, remember to put the title widget at
-- the bottom of mpd_song or it'll get complex
if title_size < dpi(250) then
    mpd_title:set_widget(title_widget)
else
    mpd_title:set_widget(rolling)
end

Also mention that mpd_title need to be put at the last of its mother container because w:get_all_children() will get all children widget recursively, it’ll be more convenient to simply put it at the bottom to avoid tedious task when extracting it.

Mpd Song Title Length Handle

Fixes to the song title crop problem in current sidebar configuration

The fix

Code change