John J Foerch [2011.03.17 2345 -0400]: [...]
Sorry it couldn't be a more profound, creative, and interesting module :D but that's what I needed. Shell prompt does not fit the bill for two reasons: 1) its prompt string is hard-coded as "Run: ", and 2) I wanted expansion of '~/' but not other special characters, so I have to manipulate the return value before passing it on to spawn.
For context, I'm using this in several screenshot commands which prompt for the name of the output file.
Maybe there is a better approach for prompting for directories and files both, but the existence of an XMonad.Prompt.Directory and no XMonad.Prompt.File looks to me like a simple omission. If the latter is a hack, then so is the former, but I'm not campaigning for any outcome, only offering something that I have found useful to others.
I agree with you on the level that it is odd that there should be a module that handles directories but cannot do the same for files and, what's worse, has a name that clearly states it deals only with directories, making my suggestion (1) below a bit suboptimal. However, the issue of whether this functionality is already offered by another module aside, there are still two fairly clean ways of including this functionality for files without the cutting and pasting: (1) Simply add the functionality you need to X.P.Directory, factoring the code common to both handling directories and files. (2) Move all the code for directories and files to X.P.File, again properly factoring it to avoid code duplication. Then rewrite the existing X.P.Directory as a thin wrapper that imports X.P.File and reexports the directory-specific functions. The second part of this solution is to not break configurations that currently use X.P.Directory. I think (2) is preferable over (1) because "Directory" suggests that this module can deal with directories but not with files, while in my experience, modules named File-something usually deal with different types of files, including directories. Cheers, Norbert