While using minimal status bar like (dwm's bar , lemonbar). They generally display a text passed to them. (Very minimal by design). But generating that is a pain in the behind. Specially if they must dynamically update like volume, brightness etc, one way to do so is by writting a very big while loop (or dividing it into scripts), This create additional dynamic updates which is for all intense and purposes is not very effective. Moreover when the bar updates (generally) every value is also updated, which is a bloat.
- well yes that's a solution but manging a lot of loops and hooks can be intemidating. Can there be a better way?
This solution is based on a named pipes.
We start our status bar by defining a template.
pipestatus -t "Value of Key1: <KEY1>, value of Key2: <KEY2>" -f /tmp/pipestatus.pipe | lemonbarwe want <KEY1> and <KEY2> in our bar to be replaced by some text, say value1 value2 respectively.
This can be achieved by a simple echo (or writing to file in any way you want)
echo "KEY1:value1" > /tmp/pipestatus.pipe; echo "KEY2:value2" > /tmp/pipestatus.pipe
or
printf "KEY1:value1\nKEY2:value2\n" > /tmp/pipestatus.pipe
- Each update is separate from one another.
- The values are stored and can be dynamically and separately updated.
- The template and the updates are handled separately.
- KEYS can be anything you want, no need to be uppercase. (I used uppercase to differentiate)
./build.sh- And copy the binary to path.
- Fast and efficient (C++)
There are a few modules here for some basic stuff which are very efficient. They are not documented yet. (Sorry), But they are simple enough for u guys.
A sample implimentation of using this in dwm's bar can be found in the Exampledir.
To run a exmple you need to have Font Awesome and Fira Code Fonts.
./Example/launch-bar-dwmmail:rohnch@protonmail.ch