yaib: Yet Another i3 Bar

yaib is a very simple (at this time of writing) status bar for the i3 window manager (X11) that leverages async computation to limit performance bottlenecks. This results in a very resource efficient bar capable of displaying statistics and other things you'd like to display.

yaib is very immature at this writing. Lots of things you want won't be here.

Some features:

• Expandable. Each block has an icon value which can then be clicked on to expand it. Combine it with the urgency coloring values, and you don't have to see text updating all day; just the colors when it matters.
• Pages: Flip between lots of different pages using the arrows. This way you can hide less important things you care about in your bar, but get to them when you want to.
• Resource light: yaib is very small and uses almost no resources.

For an example of the expansion, here's the expanded Disk section in the default configuration:

And here it is collapsed (just click):

Installation

Release:

cargo install yaib

Development (recommended):

cargo install --git https://github.com/erikh/yaib

Execution & Setup

yaib

Will emit the bar's contents to standard output in JSON format.

To integrate it into your i3 installation, provide a stanza like so in your ~/.config/i3/config file; remember to remove any other block like it.

NOTE: in this block, you must replace $HOME with your home directory.

bar {
    font pango:monospace 10, FontAwesome 10
    position bottom
    status_command $HOME/.cargo/bin/yaib
    colors {
        separator #666666
        background #222222
        statusline #dddddd
        focused_workspace #0088CC #0088CC #ffffff
        active_workspace #333333 #333333 #ffffff
        inactive_workspace #333333 #333333 #888888
        urgent_workspace #2f343a #900000 #ffffff
    }
}

Do this and reload your configuration (mod + shift + r by default) and the bar should appear!

Configuration

There is an example configuration file. This configuration file can either be specified by setting YAIB_CONFIG in the environment, or by making a file in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/yaib/yaib.config.yaml.

Field descriptions follow:

• update_interval is the amount of time to wait before polling the system, and displaying new stats. It is specified in fancy duration format which you can read more about at that link.
• pages is a list of pages to flip through. Each page consists of a list of items:
  • name is the name of the block. It is required, and must be unique for all blocks.
  • icon is the short initial clickable content. Not supported on static values. If not provided, it will display the formatted content always.
  • urgency is a 3-element tuple of values that are all under 100. They correspond to urgency values, green/yellow/red. Not supported on static or music values. When under the minimum, the default text color is used.
  • urgency_colors is a 3-element tuple of #rrggbb values. These values are used when the urgency thresholds are set.
  • type is the type of block. value and format are dependent on this type, so they will be specified with the type below:
    • command runs a command. It does not run it through a shell, and tokenizes the value by whitespace. The value is the command to run. update_interval can be used to override the global update_interval for slow running or needlessly updating commands. See example_command.sh for more information. The command must emit (and only emit) a JSON blob with the following three parameters:
      • name: this is the name of the block you configured it with, so it can map back.
      • value: this is the data you want to show in the bar. The icon will be automatically concatenated if it exists.
      • percent: this is optional, an integer from 0-100 which helps with urgency coloring.
    • dynamic is only for types which are updated by the unix socket (see below). It carries no value and communicates no urgency and has no format.
    • static just displays a static string set in the value. No formatting is applied.
    • music displays several options for listing the current music track playing via MPRIS (e.g., spotify, xmms). No value is used.
      • %artist is the current artist
      • %title is the current track title
      • %pct_played is the whole number percentage of how far along in the track you are.
      • %total_played is the minute:second time well suited for regular updates.
    • cpu are CPU metrics. Both %count (number of CPUs) and %usage are available as format strings.
    • disk are storage metrics. The value is a mount point.
      • %total is the total user storage
      • %usage is the amount used
      • %pct is the percent of disk used.
    • memory are memory metrics. No value is used.
      • %total is the total user memory
      • %usage is the amount used
      • %swap_total is the amount of swap available
      • %swap_usage is the amount of swap used
      • %pct is the percent of memory used.
      • %pct_swap is the percent of swap used.
    • load are memory metrics. No value is used.
      • %1 is the one minute load average
      • %5 is the five minute load average
      • %15 is the fifteen minute load average
    • time are time metrics. No value is used. The format is chrono's strftime format

Unix Socket

NOTE: This layer is likely to be changed dramatically in the future. It is recommended that if you use this feature, you use it through yaib commands, and not writing to the socket directly, as the protocol is certain to change.

You can write blocks using the JSON format also used for the command type. One block per write; use yaib write-block '<block json>' to write directly to the socket. The socket is also located at /tmp/yaib.sock; only the most recent copy of yaib running will respond to it, but you can use this with nc et al to control it. Just barf some JSON at the socket. See example_command.sh for an example of the output format.

Whatever the block's name value is set to will replace the block in the bar. If this block is not of a dynamic type in the configuration, it will not persist and be overwritten by new collection data in the next iteration (this behavior is expected to change in the future).

License

MIT

Author

Erik Hollensbe git@hollensbe.org