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Last update: 2018-08-26
I create a simple status bar that shows useful information like display brightness, network status and battery status. A shell script uses tools from the OpenBSD base to collect the information and write it to stdout. The tool lemonbar from ports will read the information from stdin and display it formatted in a customizable bar.
Install lemonbar as usual:
$ doas pkg_add -i lemonbar
If you want to display the current network speed you have to install ifstat too:
$ doas pkg_add -i ifstat
The script implements a function for each piece of information that is displayed by lemonbar. This makes it easy to add or remove functions to/from the script. And it eases the parsing of the output from external tools that get the values. Each function prints its value as a string without newline. The main loop of the script collects the outputs into a single string that is printed to stdout.
The lemonbar supports the formatting of the text by embedding codes into
the string it reads from stdin. My lemonbar.sh
uses the colors as indicators for different states. When the power
adapter is connected the word AC: is green, else it is red. The same
is true for the word Vol: where red indicates that the sound is muted
while green indicates the opposite.
Most of the time you want to start lemonbar when you log into X(7)
. Add something like the following lines to ~/.xsession:
lbfont=-xos4-terminus-*-*-*-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
~/bin/lemonbar.sh | lemonbar -g 2560x15 -b -n "lemonbar" -f $lbfont &
Use xfontsel(1) to generate a valid
value for $lbfont on your system. The parameter -g defines the size
of lemonbar as width x height in pixel.
Beside ifstat mentioned above the script uses tools from OpenBSD
base. In the function Wlan() you should adapt the name of the WLAN
interface to your adapter. You can download the complete script.