On the rationale of using a custom parser instead of a lex/yacc one, see this
quote from src/commands_parser.c:
We use a hand-written parser instead of lex/yacc because our commands are
easy for humans, not for computers. Thus, it’s quite hard to specify a
context-free grammar for the commands. A PEG grammar would be easier, but
there’s downsides to every PEG parser generator I have come accross so far.
This parser is basically a state machine which looks for literals or strings
and can push either on a stack. After identifying a literal or string, it
will either transition to the current state, to a different state, or call a
function (like cmd_move()).
Special care has been taken that error messages are useful and the code is
well testable (when compiled with -DTEST_PARSER it will output to stdout
instead of actually calling any function).
During the migration phase (I plan to completely switch to this parser before
4.2 will be released), the new parser will parse every command you send to
i3 and save the resulting call stack. Then, the old parser will parse your
input and actually execute the commands. Afterwards, both call stacks will be
compared and any differences will be logged.
The new parser works with 100% of the test suite and produces identical call
stacks.
Use 'kill window' to kill a specific window (for example only one specific
popup), use 'kill client' to kill the whole application (or X11 connection to
be specific).
Due to lots of cases which were added and added to tree_move(), the function
was not really easy to understand. For this refactoring, I wrote tree_move()
from scratch, thinking about (hopefully) all cases. The testsuite still passes.
The move command also has different parameters now. Instead of the hard to
understand 'before v' stuff, we use 'move [left|right|up|down]'.
You can use this in testcases to mark specific sections:
$i3->command('nop before trying to crash')->recv;
leads to the following output in the i3 logfile:
-------------------------------------------------
NOP: before trying to crash
-------------------------------------------------
