Making a Status Bar IV

After getting frustrated with conky and awesome-client in Making a Status Bar III, I wrote the following using ruby.

As an aside, to get conky working:

• pull conky's source
• recompile without X11 support

...or, you can just read Making a Status Bar V

Anyway...

Contents 1 Modify your ~/.awesomerc 2 Create an "awesome-status" 3 Apply the proper permissions to "awesome-status" 4 Modify your ~/.xinitrc

Modify your ~/.awesomerc

    statusbar "bottom" {
        position = "bottom"
        height = 0
        width = 0

        textbox clock {
            text_align = "left"
            align = "left"
            width = 100
        }

        textbox mpdstatus {
            text_align="right"
            align="right"
        }

        textbox song {
            text_align="right"
            align="right"
        }

        textbox time {
            text_align="right"
            align="right"
        }
    }

Create an "awesome-status"

You'll need the following if you don't have it already:

• ruby
• rubygems
• librmpd

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'librmpd'
require 'date'

class MyClient
    Pipe = '/usr/bin/awesome-client'
    
    def writeDate
        date = DateTime::now
        writePipe("clock", date.strftime('%a %e %b %Y %H:%M'))
    end

    def state_callback(newstate)
        writePipe("mpdstatus", "#{newstate} | ")
    end

    def song_callback(newsong) 
        song = "#{newsong.artist} | #{newsong.album} | #{newsong.title}"
        writePipe("song", song) 
    end

    def time_callback(elapsed, total) 
        time = " | #{formatSeconds(elapsed)} | #{formatSeconds(total)}"
        writePipe("time", time)
    end

private
    def writePipe(widget, status)

        # This was annoying -- I finally figured out I needed a newline to ensure the status was updated
        toWrite = "0 widget_tell #{widget} #{status}\n"  
        pipe = IO.popen(Pipe, "w")
        pipe.write(toWrite)
        pipe.close
    end

    def formatSeconds(time) 
        minutes = time / 60
        seconds = time % 60
        return "%02d:%02d" % [ minutes, seconds ]
    end
end


client = MyClient.new

# If you restart awesome, you lose some info until a "current song" event is fired.
mpd = MPD.new 'localhost', 6600
mpd.register_callback(client.method('state_callback'), MPD::STATE_CALLBACK)
mpd.register_callback(client.method('song_callback'), MPD::CURRENT_SONG_CALLBACK)
mpd.register_callback(client.method('time_callback'), MPD::TIME_CALLBACK)

mpd.connect(true)


while true do
    client.writeDate
    sleep 1
end

Apply the proper permissions to "awesome-status"

$ chmod 755 awesome-status

Modify your ~/.xinitrc

awesome-status &
exec awesome

Enjoy!