akuma-v-dwm

akuma-v-dwm is a daemon that displays the status bar for window managers like dwm. It is modular, event driven, and efficient, only recomputing the requested parts of the status bar during updates.

The Daemon

The daemon creates a modular status bar by updating the X root window name when it receives a request on its named pipe. It takes an ordered list of modules as a parameter, and calls a function in each module to compute a section of the status bar when it receives a request to update that section.

The Scheduler

The scheduler creates requests by writing a module name to the named pipe for each section of the status bar that it wants to daemon to update. It can send requests immediately, after some delay, or repeatedly at some interval.

Installation

Clone the repo.

git clone https://gitlab.com/narvin/avd

Usage

The following examples can be executed manually or by putting them in, e.g., your .xinitrc file. Note the & after long-running commands to make them run in the background. If the directory that you cloned the appliction into is not in your path, be sure to specify the path when calling avdd or avds.

Start the daemon to create a status bar with the default sections, prefix, separators, and suffix.

avdd &

Or, start the daemon to create a status with only the volume and date/time sections, with the entire status between square brackets (prefix/suffix), and each section surrounded by angle brackets (separators). Note that the first left separator and the last right separator are stripped from the output, so if you want them back, simply include them in the prefix and suffix as shown here.

avdd 'vol-amixer dt' '[<' '<' '>' '>]' &

Next, schedule the battery info and the date and time to be updated at the top of each minute.

avds 'bat,dt' m true &

Then schedule the CPU and memory usage to be updated every 5 seconds.

avds 'cpu mem' 5000 true &

You can add these commmands to your volume and brightness keybindings to update the status when those keys are pressed. Note that these jobs don't need to be backgrounded since they run immediately and exit.

avds vol-amixer
avds bl

In case you have multiple daemons running, e.g., in different login sessions, you can update them all simultaneously. This would have all running daemons update the volume and backlight sections of their statuses at once.

avds '>>* vol-amixer'
avds '>>* bl'

You can also bind keys to commands like those in the cmd directory to perform actions and also update the status bar. For instance, you can bind keys to these commands to control the backlight and volume while also updating the status bar:

./cmd/lowerbl
./cmd/raisebl
./cmd/lowervol-amixer
./cmd/raisevol-amixer
./cmd/mutevol-amixer

Modules

To create your own module, write a bash shell script with a function called mod_<name> where <name> is the filename of your script, with dashes replaced with underscores. For instance, if your module file is called weather-wttr, it should contain a function called mod_weather_wttr. This function should print to stdout whatever you want to appear in its section of the status bar (so it should be concise with no newline characters). Then place your script in the mod directory.

To include your module output in the status bar, start the daemon with the module list parameter and include the name of your module in the list. For instance, if you wanted to have a status bar that consisited of your hypothetical weather-wttr module followed by the date/time, you would start the daemon like this: avdd 'weather-wttr dt' &.

Reserved Module Names

Module names may not begin with daem- or daem_ because this namespace is reserved for requests that the daemon understands natively. The daemon implements the following native requests:

daem_all Update all status bar sections.
daem_quit Quit the daemon.

Commands

In the cmd directory are shell scripts that perform actions that effect and update the status bar, such as changing the backlight or volume levels. These commands can be bound to keys, so the action will be carried out and the status bar will be updated when the key is pressed.

Contributing

The goal of this project is to learn how to do neat things on Linux and with shell scripts. A great way to do that is to just start hacking. So if you have an ideas for how to improve the application, or want to share your modules and commands, please submit a pull request. Don't by shy!

For inspiration and examples of modules you might want to create, check out the bar-functions from dwm-bar, which this project draws heavily upon. Please note that those bar-functions are not compatible with the akuma-v-dwm daemon, but they could very easily be modified to work with this daemon.

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