nmeum / creek

A malleable and minimalist status bar for the River compositor

README

Creek is a dwm-inspired malleable and minimalist status bar for the River Wayland compositor. The implementation is a hard fork of version 0.1.3 of the levee status bar. Compared to levee, the main objective is to ease recombination and reuse by providing a simpler interface for adding custom information to the status bar. The original version of levee only provides builtin support for certain modules, these have to be written in Zig and compiled into levee. This fork pursues an alternative direction by allowing arbitrary text to be written to standard input of the status bar process, this text is then displayed in the status bar.

Additionally, the following new features have been added:

• Support for tracking the current window title in the status bar
• Highlighting of tags containing urgent windows (see xdg-activation)
• Basic run-time configuration support via command-line flags

Screenshot

The screenshot features three active tags: tag 2 is currently focused and has one active window, tag 4 is not focused but is occupied (i.e. has windows), and tag 9 has an urgent window. In the middle of the status bar, the current title of the selected window on the focused tag is displayed. On the right-hand side, the current time is shown, this is information is generated using date(1) (see usage example below).

Build

The following dependencies need to be installed:

• zig 0.12.0
• wayland 1.21.0
• pixman 0.42.0
• fcft 3.1.5 (with utf8proc support)

Afterwards, creek can be build as follows

$ git clone https://git.8pit.net/creek.git
$ cd creek
$ zig build

Configuration

This version of creek can be configured using several command-line options:

• -fn: The font used in the status bar
• -hg: The total height of the status bar
• -nf: Normal foreground color
• -nb: Normal background color
• -ff: Foreground color for focused tags
• -fb: Background color for focused tags

Example:

$ creek -fn Terminus:size=12 -hg 18 -nf 0xffffff -nb 0x000000

Usage Example

In order to display the current time in the top-right corner, invoke creek as follows:

$ ( while date; do sleep 1; done ) | creek

Note that for more complex setups, a shell script may not be the best option.

creek's Issues

scaled output messes up bar

Thanks for tagging a new release, and allowing build with 0.12 zig.
I build and tried this on void linux, and it looks and feels quite nice.

One issue I encounter is that, for scaled output, the bar is messed up,
namely there's one more black bar below it.
By scaled, I mean wlr-randr --output eDP-1 --scale 2 in river init.
Also, it'd be nice to have a -Dpie configure option, to produce pie executables.

Finally, what are your thoughts about implementing a config file?
instead of piping the output and/or poling frequently, the config file could contain
the actual command(s) I want to run, e.g date '+%a %Y-%m-%d %H:%M',
and their polling time, e.g. 5s,
as well as possibly the various options for font, color, etc,
similar to dwm but without the need to rebuild it.

Systray?

Are there any plans for systray support? Would it be possible to have a systray?