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icewm is probably my favourite window manager for X. When I'm using a UNIX system. Here is a screenshot:

Why do I love it? Well, for one thing on my system it is consuming about 10MB of RAM. Actually I'm running icewm-session so it's a bit more but really I only need the icewm part. So that is one reason, here are two others:

• CTRL-ALT-SPACE brings up a command execution input field on the taskbar. This really useful for launching programs and so on. Much quicker than navigating a menu. For example I've aliased firefox3 to ff, so the launch is just CTRL-ALT-SPACE in one strike, ff, enter, and that's it..
• Multi desktop support is builtin by default, and 4 desktops is the standard. It is easy to switch between by using CTRL-ALT-LEFT or CTRL-ALT-RIGHT. A window can be moved into another desktop just by adding a SHIFT into those commands.

OK so these are mainly about key bindings, but I just find that these defaults come naturally to me, and I find using icewm much more productive and straightforward than other wm. Mainly because I don't really need a menu and all that crap, I just need lots of shells and a way to switch between windows.

Anyway, to get the point of this post, icewm doesn't have a volume control thing. Lots of people have written them but it occurred to me that I didn't want to waste resources running some stupid thing just to change volume. I mean, how often do I change volume? Not very often. So why have an app running in the background dilligently waiting for my commands? No, it would be a waste.

On FreeBSD, controlling the volume of the soundcard is done via the mixer command. It is simple, mixer on its own lists all of the soundcard mixer values: line in, cd, pcm, etc. And changing say the volume is done by "mixer vol 30" to set it to 30. So I thought, fuckit, why not just write something in python in a few minutes to do this with a slider. Well here it is:

#!/usr/local/bin/python
import commands
from Tkinter import Tk,IntVar,Scale

def adjustVol(vol):
   commands.getoutput("/usr/sbin/mixer vol "+vol)
   return

root = Tk()
root.geometry('50x100+80+620')
vol = IntVar()
scale = Scale(root,variable=vol,from_=100,to=0,command=adjustVol)
scale.set(commands.getoutput('/usr/sbin/mixer -S').split(':')[1])
scale.pack()
root.mainloop()

mixerapp.py

That's it! The code simply creates a Tk window with a slider and sets the value accordingly. Since I wasn't making it generic, I just hard coded the screen position so that it came above the volume icon I added to the icewm toolbar. Here it is in action:

icewm toolbar then has an entry like this:

prog MixerControl vol_16x16.png /path/to/mixerapp.py

I got the icon image by searching on google images using the imagesize:16x16 modifier.