the-x80 / excalibar Goto Github PK

Excalibar is a fast and modular taskbar for X11, which provides good plugin support and configurable aestethics. Its goal is to be the sword amongst the taskbars: sharp and shiny. Because Excalibar is magical, it is also lighter when unsheathed, and strives not to stress your cpu.

Joke apart, Excalibar uses low-level library events, and is thus way lighter than other taskbars (some of which loop through bash scripts). It also gives a lot of freedom to plugins so they can be optimized.

Each section in the configuration file represents a plugin, and the core program loads them by reading a section's name before copying the values it holds. The order in which you write theses sections determines their position in the bar. The "side" parameter can be set either to 0 or 1 to indicate the plugin's alignment (left or right). Each global parameter can be superseded for a particular plugin.

Excalibar is written in C99 with xcb, cairo and pango as well as some static routines from inih (which is linked to this repo as a submodule). "And what's the recipe ? Excalibar weaponry !"

This repo contains submodules, to get them clone with:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/nullgemm/excalibar.git

First, compile and install libexcalibar:

cd lib
make
sudo make install

Then repeat these steps for the core program:

cd ../bar
make
sudo make install

While you are in the bar folder, edit and copy the config file:

nano excalibar.cfg
make cpconfig

Eventually, compile and install all the plugins: (no sudo here!)

cd ../plugins
make
make install

You can then launch excalibar as a daemon:

excalibar &

And close it properly with a sigterm:

pkill excalibar

The process survives after you quit your terminal ;)

Oxodao for the support, name approval and minecraft breaks

Raphaël for the memory I got the name idea from

Buckethead for the good music

Cairo and Pango contributors for the outstanding documentation