zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Adam Porter <adam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I use Zim to keep daily journals sometimes.  I like to timestamp
entries.  I want to be able to press Ctrl+T to insert the current
time, bolded.  Seems simple enough, right?

But I have been through quite a rigamarole trying to make this happen.
 I made a shell script that uses xdotool to send the Ctrl+B keystrokes
and type the current time in, and I bound that to Meta+T in KDE, but
this has a race condition in which the script runs before I release
Meta, and Meta ends up remaining pressed, causing my typing to
activate other hotkeys.  This can cause unfortunate results if I type
quickly.

I tried in vain to find a terminal app to simply check the state of
modifier keys.  If my script could wait until Meta is released, it
would be fine.  Finally I found the source to a very simple C program
that uses linux/input.h functions to check the state of modifier keys.
 I'm not a C programmer, but I was able to modify it slightly and
compile it to just watch the LEFTMETA key.  It works great, except
that /dev/input/event* are not world-readable by default, so I have to
either run it as sudo (which is not suitable), or change the
permissions of the keyboard event device on every system at every
boot.

Then I tried to find an example of C code using Xlib to check the
status of keyboard keys, because using Xlib wouldn't require root
permissions.  But all I could find was that Xlib is arcane even for
experienced C programmers.

Finally I returned to an idea I had a long time ago of adding a hotkey
in Zim to do it, like Ctrl+T.  I dug around and found the code for the
Ctrl+D insert-date-time dialog in pageview.py.  I copied the
InsertDateDialog class, copied the insert_date function, and added an
entry to the menu.xml file (I replaced "date" with "time").  I don't
want a dialog to open when this happens--I only want it to insert the
current time, bolded, when I press Ctrl+T.

I am so close to having it work.  It took some trial and error, and a
few "Looks like you discovered a bug" dialogs, but finally I cut
everything out of the InsertTimeDialog (formerly InsertDateDialog)
class except this in __init__:

class InsertTimeDialog(Dialog):
    def __init__(self, ui, buffer):
        buffer.insert_at_cursor("**"+datetime.datetime.now().strftime('%H:%M')+"**")

But now, instead of "discovering a bug", when I press Ctrl+T and
activate these few lines of code, Zim instantly crashes, and there is
no terminal output at all, not even from Python!

I think it's Gtk causing the crash because I took out the
Dialog-related code.  So I uncommented the lines in that class and dug
around some more and discovered toggle_format_strong().  But I don't
know how to call that from InsertTimeDialog.  I tried using
buffer.toggle_format('strong'), but I get "AttributeError:
'TextBuffer' object has no attribute 'toggle_format'".

I'm so close.  Please help.  :)