Simple Clock

These are simple instructions to add a clock to your Awesome status bar. Or, more basically, this example is used to create a simple widget using simple techniques. While the script used to populate the data isn't the best, it's functional. At the bottom of the page is a better script to be used to achieve the same results.

With these simple techniques, you can create widgets that update from virtually any source of data.

Contents 1 Adding the text field to your .awesomerc 2 Populate the data in the widget (awesome 2.2) 3 Populate the data in the widget (awesome-2.3) 4 Troubleshooting 5 Make the clock auto-start with X 6 A Better Method for sending the data

Adding the text field to your .awesomerc

Edit your ~/.awesomerc and add to the "screen/statusbar" section - this is just a skeleton config file to make sure the code is put into the right spot:

screen 0
{ 
 ... config file snipped ...
statusbar mystatusbar {
   ...config file snipped ...
  taglist mytag {
    ...config file snipped ...
  }
  layoutinfo mylayout {
    ...config file snipped ...
  }
  #
  # Add the lines below to create the clock
  #
  textbox clock {
    text_align = "right"
    align = "right" 
    width = "100" # Note: Once you get this working, you may need to tweak the 'width' a bit depending on the font you're using.
  }
  #
  # Stop here
  #
}

Populate the data in the widget (awesome 2.2)

Create ~/bin/awesome-clock (You can add .sh if you would like)

#!/bin/sh
# this script is for awesome 2.2

updateClock() {
  # See 'man date' to see the possible replacements for the % fields.
  echo "0 widget_tell clock `date +\"%a, %b %d %I:%M%p\"`" | awesome-client
}

while true; do
  updateClock
  sleep 10;
done

Make it executable:

 $ chmod a+x ~/bin/awesome-clock

For awesome 2.3.x just change the piped echo command in the script above to:

   echo "0 widget_tell mystatusbar clock text `date +\"%a, %b %d %I:%M%p\"`" | awesome-client

Populate the data in the widget (awesome-2.3)

Create ~/bin/awesome-clock (You can add .sh if you would like)

#!/bin/sh
# this script is for awesome 2.3

# Point this to a directory you can write to. 
#PID=~/var/run/awesome_clock.pid
PID=~/bin/awesome_clock.pid

updateClock() {
   # See 'man date' to see the possible replacements for the % fields.
   echo "0 widget_tell mystatusbar clock text "   " `date +\"%a, %b %d %I:%M %p\"`" | awesome-client
}

# This will prevent this script from running multiple times
if [ -f $PID ] ; then
   kill -0 `cat $PID` 2> /dev/null
   if [ $? -ne 0 ] ; then
       echo "["`date`"] $0 killed bogus lock file ["`cat $PID`"]"
   else
       echo "["`date`"] $0 already running ["`cat $PID`"]"
       exit
   fi
fi
echo $$ > $PID

while true; do
  updateClock
  sleep 10;
done

Make it executable:

 $ chmod a+x ~/bin/awesome-clock

If you get a message like:

W: awesome: send_msg:60: can't write to /home/username/.awesome_ctl.0

then just creat a blank file called ".awesome_ctl.0" in your home directory.

Troubleshooting

Before adding to .xinitrc, doing a manual test to make sure everything is set up correctly is a good idea. To test or troubleshoot this setup, you can run (for awesome-2.3)

 echo "0 widget_tell mystatusbar clock text "   " `date +\"%a, %b %d %I:%M %p\"`" | awesome-client

From a terminal command line to verify the clock update function works properly

Make the clock auto-start with X

Add the following lines to ~/.xinitrc if you want it to start up every time you start awesome

   ~/bin/awesome-clock &
   exec awesome

A Better Method for sending the data

The above methods are to show the flexibility of using the awesome-client command. A better script to accomplish the same is the below:

Create ~/bin/better-awesome-clock

 #!/bin/sh
 #
 while true 
 do
       if [ -S ~/.awesome_ctl.0 ]; then
               while true
               do
                       # See 'man date' to see the possible replacements for the % fields.
                       # uncomment the following line for use with awesome 2.3
                       # echo "0 widget_tell mystatusbar clock text "   " `date +\"%a, %b %d %I:%M %p\"`"
                       echo "0 widget_tell clock "   " `date +\"%a, %b %d %I:%M %p\"`"
                       echo "" # an empty line flushes data inside awesome
                       sleep 1
               done | awesome-client
       else
           sleep 1
       fi
 done