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 the USR1 signal. 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. Each section is cached and only recomputed upon request. These requests are made by creating empty files with the same names as the modules in the /tmp/avdd directory, then sending the daemon a USR1 signal.

The Scheduler

The scheduler creates request files in /tmp/avdd, then sends the USR1 signal to the daemon. It can send one signal to update multiple status bar sections by creating a request file for each section to update, and can send the signal 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 include 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 &

Finally, 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

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 script 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' &.

Please feel free to submit a pull request to have your module included as part of this repo. And 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.

Commands

In the cmd directory are shell scripts that perform actions that effect the status bar 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.

Please feel free to submit a pull request to have your command included as part of this repo.