This is a fork from https://github.com/UtkarshVerma/dwmblocks with my config.
A modular statusbar for dwm
written in C. You may think of it as i3blocks
, but for dwm
.
- Modular
- Lightweight
- Suckless
- Modules are clickable
- Each module can be externally triggered to update itself
- Compatible with
i3blocks
scripts
Apart from these features, this build of
dwmblocks
is more optimized and fixes the scroll issue due to which the statusbar flickers on scrolling.
In dwm
, you have to set the statusbar through an infinite loop like this:
while :; do
xsetroot -name "$(date)"
sleep 30
done
It may not look bad as it is, but it's surely not the most efficient way when you've got to run multiple commands, out of which only few need to be updated as frequently as the others.
# Displaying an unread mail count in the status bar
while :; do
xsetroot -name "$(mailCount) $(date)"
sleep 60
done
For example, I display an unread mail count in my statusbar. Ideally, I would want this count to update every thirty minutes, but since I also have a clock in my statusbar which has to be updated every minute, I can't stop the mail count from being updated every minute.
As you can see, this is wasteful. And since my mail count script uses Gmail's APIs, there's a limit to the number of requests I can make, being a free user.
What dwmblocks
does is that it allows you to break up the statusbar into multiple blocks, each of which have their own update interval. The commands in a particular block are only executed once in that interval. Hence, we don't run into our problem anymore.
What's even better is that you can externally trigger updation of any specific block.
The installation is simple, just clone this repository, modify config.h
appropriately, and then do a sudo make install
.
git clone https://github.com/UtkarshVerma/dwmblocks.git
vi config.h
sudo make install
To have dwmblocks
set your statusbar, you need to run it as a background process on startup. One way is by adding the following to ~/.xinitrc
.
dwmblocks &
You can define your statusbar blocks in config.h
. Each block has the following properties:
Property | Value |
---|---|
Command | The command you wish to execute in your block |
Update interval | Time in seconds, after which you want the block to update. Setting this to 0 will result in the block never being updated. |
Update signal | Signal to be used for triggering the block. Must be a positive integer. |
The syntax for defining a block is:
static const Block blocks[] = {
...
{"date", 1800, 1},
...
}
Apart from that you can also modify the block delimiters and width of each block as shown.
#define CMDLENGTH 50
#define delimiter " "
Most statusbars constantly rerun every script every several seconds to update. This is an option here, but a superior choice is giving your module a signal that you can signal to it to update on a relevant event, rather than having it rerun idly.
For example, the volume module has the update signal 5 by default. Thus, running pkill -RTMIN+5 dwmblocks
will update it.
You can also run kill -44 $(pidof dwmblocks)
which will have the same effect, but is faster. Just add 34 to your typical signal number.
My volume module never updates on its own, instead I have this command run along side my volume shortcuts in dwm
to only update it when relevant.
Note that all modules must have different signal numbers.
Like i3blocks
, this build allows you to build in additional actions into your scripts in response to click events. You can check out my statusbar scripts as references for using the $BLOCK_BUTTON
variable.
For this feature to work, you need dwm
to be patched with statuscmd.
This work would not have been possible without Luke's build of dwmblocks and Daniel Bylinka's statuscmd patch.