wmstatusd

Daemon to show status information in the bar of some Window Manager like dwm or nimdow

Usage

The standard usecase for this porgram is to start it with default values and see the informations in the window managers bar:

$ wmstatusd

It is recommended to start this program as background process.

To show only a subset of the available modules or reorder them, the desired module names may be given to the command as a space-separated list to overwrite the default configuration:

$ wmstatusd date time battery

The modules currently available are:

• time
• date
• backlight
• volume
• mic
• cpu (currently only shows temperature, will be changed in the furture)
• battery

There are some further command line options:

--help, -h         print help message
--colors, -c       enable colors
--no-colors        disable colors
--config, -C       alternative config file
--debug, -d        debug mode
--list-tags, -l    list available tags

Installation

This program is written in the Nim Programming Language so a Nim-Compiler is required. The prefered installation method is using choosenim. (Do not forget to add the nimble binary directory (usually: ~/.nimble/bin) to your system path by appending export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.nimble/bin to according configuration file like ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile.)

Clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/Smintheus98/wmstatusd.git
$ cd wmstatusd

After installation of Nim use:

$ nimble install

to install the programs (nim based) dependencies and compile and install the program afterwards.

The program will be installed to $HOME/.nimble/bin. Make sure to include that directory into your system path. For explicit instructions see start of this section.

For the configuration via the NimScript file it is currently required having a recent installation of the nim compiler on the system. This requirement will probably be removed in a future release.

Troubleshooting

You may be required to install the development files of the asound library manually. A likely package name might be: libasound2-dev

Configuration

The program can be configured by a NimScript file placed at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/wmstatusd/wmstatusd.conf. If XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not defined the program defaults to ~/.config/wmstatusd/wmstatusd.conf. If the file does not exist, the program installs a default file automatically. An invalid configuration will prevent the program from starting.

The default configuration looks like this:

config main:
  tags = @[time, date, backlight, volume, mic, cputemp, battery]
  separator = "|"
  separatorColor = CWHITE
  padding = 1
  useColors = true
  savepower = false
  locale = en_US

It makes use of the macro config without which the variable assignments would have to look like this:

main.tags = @[time, date, backlight, volume, mic, cputemp, battery]

Details:

• tags: List and order of modules to show.
• separator: String of symbols put between the modules information strings.
• separatorColor: Color of the separator. May be one of: CBLACK, CRED, CGREEN, CYELLOW, CBLUE, CMAGENTA, CCYAN, CWHITE, CRESET
• padding: Number of spaces between information and separator. May be completely replaced by according separator-string.
• useColors: Use colored mode.
• savepower: Mode affecting the refresh-times so the program consumes less power.
• locale: locale to use for modules like date. May be one of: en_US, de_DE

Since the configuration file is pure NimScript it is possible to embed scripts or make the configuration depending on the actual system and its capabilities

Todo v1.0.0:

I have decided to give this project of mine a rather extensive make over including the redesign of the software. This may or may not include the configuration using NimScript which, while being quite usefull, feels like a pretty heavy dependency.

• Rewrite
• centralize configuration with the different config-styles (file config, cli config, thread config)
• extend and rename colors (256-colors)
• add module cpu(-usage)
• Proper code documentation and functionality tests