k5dstatus

The ultimate DIY statusline generator for i3wm.

About

k5dstatus is in the early phases of development and will need some adjustments to get right. If you use k5dstatus, send me feedback!

k5dstatus is a statusline generator for i3 that you can use to display system information you may be interested in. i3 comes with i3status which has many limitations. It has no plugin interface. It has no support for events and relies on polling for all its information, which makes it surprisingly heavy on resources. It has a weird config file format that makes it difficult to configure.

Other projects have come along to make up for these weaknesses and many of them do a great job. k5dstatus is for users who want a more flexible statusline that can be achieved from editing options in a configuration file but without having to learn a complicated plugin api to create custom statusline entries.

This is accomplished by allowing users to update the statusline through interprocess communication using DBUS. k5dstatus exposes a DBUS service that you can use to update the statusline simply in pretty much any programming language and from any process (maybe even in a cron!).

• No configuration file is required
• Update the statusline from multiple processes
• Update the statusline from any language (even from the command line!)
• No complicated plugin api to learn

Relation to i3-dstatus

This project is a source fork and rewrite of i3-dstatus. It does not attempt to maintain compatibility or upstream pairing.

Installing

k5dstatus is on PyPI.

pip install k5dstatus

You'll also need python-gobject and python-dbus from your package manager.

Usage

Use k5dstatus as your status command in your bar block like so:

bar {
    status_command k5-dstatus clock
}

Configuration

Generator scripts will look for ~/.k5dstatus.conf for configuration options. See k5dstatus.conf in the repo for an example. The configuration file should be a single YAML object. (More documentation to come).

Contributing

Please report bugs, request feature, write documentation, and add generators to the k5dstatus/generators directory. k5dstatus is a community project so feedback is welcome!

License

This work is available under a FreeBSD License (see LICENSE).

Copyright © 2015, James Bliss

All rights reserved.