Installation

The simplest way to install specbar is to use pip:

pip install specbar

Another way is to download the source and copy specbar.py somewhere in your PYTHONPATH.

Usage

Example:

# Extending with own info function
>>> import specbar
>>> @specbar.info_collector(42)
... def get_some_info(num):
...     return dict(square=num**2)
...
>>> specbar.loop(format_str='Square info: {square}')
Square info: 1764
Shutting down specbar...
>>>

That’s it now your own function get’s called every 5 (default) seconds and the format string is displayed in the statusbar. The loop (when testing) can easily killed by pressing CTRL+C.

Using builtin functions:

>>> import specbar
>>> specbar.register(specbar.get_gmail_count, 'myuser', 'mysecret')
>>> specbar.loop('New Mails: {gmail_count:<3}', 15)

Now every 15 seconds your Gmail account is checked for new mail and the result is displayed.

Every info function must return a dict. All dicts where merged in a defaultdict to have no exception on missing keys. See the source of specbar.py for the returned keys of the builtin functions.

In the source distribution an example.py file is included which shows the usage of specbar.py.

Integration with spectrwm

Create your own script or edit example.py to your needs, put it somewhere on your PATH, make it executable (chmod +x) and add it to ~/.spectrwm.conf as your bar_action.

Misc

Specbar is mainly written for spectrwm on Arch Linux where Python 3 is the standard Python. I think it can be used with any other window manager which reads from stdin and with any other (posix) os which has Python 3 available.