status-text

Asynchronous executor of shell commands. Intended to be used to set statusbar text.

Program outputs to stdout. Every line it outputs should be used to set the statusbar. You can achieve this by piping the output to another program that will set the status.

Configuration

Copy an example configuration file and modify it accordingly.

cp config.def.h config.h

Installing

make
sudo make install

Forcing refresh

You can send a signal using Linux signaling mechanism to force a command reexecution. This is especially useful when you set refresh interval to 0 and would like to manually trigger the update.

# Use 34 + command array index as a signal number.
# This will reexecute first command and update the status text information.
kill -34 $(pidof status-text)

Usage example

Example config:

#define MAX_STRING_SIZE 1024

const char *start_delimiter = "[";
const char *end_delimiter = "]";

task_t task_list[] = {
    /* Number of packages that can be updated. */
    {"pacman -Qu | wc -l | awk '{printf(\"P %4d\\n\"), $1}'", 15},
    /* Current CPU load. */
    {"awk -v a=\"$(awk '/cpu /{print $2+$4,$2+$4+$5}' /proc/stat; sleep 1)\" "
     "'/cpu /{split(a,b,\" \"); {printf(\"C %3.f%\\n\"), "
     "100*($2+$4-b[1])/($2+$4+$5-b[2])}}'  /proc/stat",
     15},
    /* Current memory load. */
    {"free -t | awk 'NR == 2 {printf(\"M %3.f%\\n\"), $3/$2*100}'", 15},
    /* Current volume. */
    {"(pulsemixer --get-mute; pulsemixer --get-volume) | awk "
     "'NR==1{printf(\"%s\"), $1 ? \"X \": \"V \" "
     "};NR==2{printf(\"%3d%\\n\"), "
     "$1}'",
     0},
    /* Current datetime. */
    {"date '+%a %F %I:%M %p'", 5},
    /* Keyboard layout. */
    {"cat /home/arnor/.cache/.dwl_kbd_layout", 0},
};

In the example, time updates periodically, every 5 seconds, but volume never updates by itself. It only updates when I force the refresh from a separate shell:

# Change volume through pulsemixer and send signal to status-text to update the value. Signal 37 is used because volume has an index of 3.
pulsemixer --change-volume -5 && kill -37 $(pidof status-text)
pulsemixer --change-volume +5 && kill -37 $(pidof status-text)

Example output (notice how volume and time update):

[P    0]
[P    0][C   1%]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  75%]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  75%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:38 PM]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  75%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:38 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  75%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:38 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  80%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:38 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  80%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:38 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  80%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:38 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  80%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:38 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  80%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:38 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  80%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:39 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  80%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:39 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  75%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:39 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  55%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:39 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  45%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:39 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  40%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:39 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  40%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:39 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  40%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:39 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  40%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:39 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  35%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:39 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  30%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:39 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  25%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:39 PM][en]
[P    0][C   1%][M  10%][V  25%][Mon 2023-10-09 10:39 PM][en]