Lemonbuddy

A fast and easy-to-use tool for creating status bars.

Lemonbuddy aims to help users build beautiful and highly customizable status bars for their desktop environment, without the need of having a black belt in shell scripting. Heres a few screenshots showing you what it can look like:

Please note that the project still is in early development, so please report any problems by creating an issue ticket.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Getting started
  • Dependencies
  • Building from source
• Running
• Launching the bar in your wm's bootstrap routine
• Configuration
• License

Introduction

The main purpose of Lemonbuddy is to help users create awesome status bars. It has built-in functionality to generate content for the most commonly used widgets, such as:

• Playback controls and status display for MPD using libmpdclient
• ALSA volume controls
• Workspace and desktop panel for bspwm and i3
• CPU and memory load indicator
• Battery display
• Network connection details
• Backlight level
• Date and time label
• Time-based shell script execution
• Command output tailing
• User-defined menu tree
• And more...

Each bar contains a set of modules, which in turn defines a set of formatting rules and options. Read more about how the configuration works.

Getting started

If you are using Arch Linux, you can install the AUR package lemonbuddy-git to get the latest version, or lemonbuddy for the latest stable release.

If you create a package for any other distribution, please consider contributing the template so that we can make the application available for more people.

Dependencies

A compiler with c++14 support. For example clang.

• cmake
• boost
• xcb-util-wm
• libXft
• python2

Optional dependencies for module support:

• wireless_tools (required for internal/network support)
• alsa-lib (required for internal/volume support)
• libmpdclient (required for internal/mpd support)
• jsoncpp (required for internal/i3 support)

$ pacman -S cmake python2 boost xcb-util-wm libxft wireless_tools alsa-lib libmpdclient jsoncpp
$ apt-get install cmake cmake-data libboost-dev libfreetype6-dev libxcb1-dev libxcb-util0-dev libxcb-randr0-dev libxcb-ewmh-dev libxcb-icccm4-dev xcb-proto python-xcbgen i3-wm libiw-dev libasound2-dev libmpdclient-dev

Building from source

Please report any problems you run into when building the project. It helps alot.

$ git clone --branch 2.0.0-beta --recursive https://github.com/jaagr/lemonbuddy
$ mkdir lemonbuddy/build
$ cd lemonbuddy/build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
$ sudo make install

Running

Before customizing the bar, make sure everything works as expected by trying out one of the example configurations installed with the application. The following code will get you started:

# Create the config root directory
$ mkdir -p ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/lemonbuddy
$ cd ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/lemonbuddy

# Copy sample config for the running wm (uses a wm agnostic config as fallback)
$ __wm=$(pgrep -l -x "(bspwm|i3)"); __prefix=$(which lemonbuddy)
$ cp "${__prefix%%/bin*}/share/examples/lemonbuddy/config${__wm:+.${__wm##* }}" config

# Launch the bar
# (where "example" is the name of the bar as defined by [bar/NAME] in the config)
$ lemonbuddy example

NOTE: In case the bar output looks odd, it's probably because you're missing he fonts defined in the config. Update the config or install the missing fonts.

Launching the bar in your wm's bootstrap routine

Create an executable file containing the startup logic, for example $HOME/.config/lemonbuddy/launch.sh:

#!/usr/bin/env sh

# Terminate already running bar instances
killall -q lemonbuddy

# Launch bar1 and bar2
lemonbuddy bar1 &
lemonbuddy bar2 &

echo "Bars launched..."

Make it executable:

$ chmod +x $HOME/.config/lemonbuddy/launch.sh

If you are using bspwm, add the following line to bspwmrc:

$HOME/.config/lemonbuddy/launch.sh

If you are using i3, add the following line to your configuration:

exec_always --no-startup-id $HOME/.config/lemonbuddy/launch.sh

Configuration

Details on how to setup and configure the bar and each module have been moved to the wiki.

License

Lemonbuddy is licensed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for more information.