I’ll keep it as a backup in case awesome dies on me again, but I’ll go back to a meal with butter, thank you very much.

The small thing that led me back to awesome is the banality of colored statusbar entries. I know there’s a patch [...]]]> Bye dwm… I’ve gone awesome again, the diet is over.

I’ll keep it as a backup in case awesome dies on me again, but I’ll go back to a meal with butter, thank you very much.

The small thing that led me back to awesome is the banality of colored statusbar entries. I know there’s a patch for dwm which does that, but if I start patching up dwm to bloat up, I might as well just use something else.

I’m using a simple text widget in my awesome statusbar to display some basic stuff about my system:

If you really want to know more, follow me…

The elements:

• e(w:X|b:X|c:X) – the rfkill status of my eeepcs wireless and bluetooth and whether the camera is activated
• df(X) – how much disk is still free
• vl(X) – volume setting of the LineOut channel and whether it is muted
• bt(X) – charge level of the battery, turns red when low
• nt(X) – network device which provides my current default route or None
• tm() – time

The default awesome config files suggest updating status items in fixed intervals of a few seconds, which makes sense for things like clocks etc, but do not work well for things which are ‘expensive’ to check and rarely change, like volume settings and networks status, so I ditched that approach and looked for something which would

• React immediately if some action occurs, without delay
• Not do polling

Most modern distributions use something like e.g. dbus to push such information around the system. A daemon like hald reacts to some hardware event (hotplug, rfkill, whatever) and uses dbus to notify clients.

While I like dbus in generall for IPC, it did not seem to carry all information I needed to fill my statusbar out of the box, so I used something else: inotify.

Inotify works by a program registering certain events (e.g. open, access, close) on a file or directory and when one of them happens the kernel tells you about it. I sniffed around the directory tree for usable files and put together a small python daemon which

• sets up inotify watches on these files
• updates awesomes statusbar if something happens… via dbus

The code was thrown together to ‘just work’. Use at your own risk. You’ll need a couple of python modules to make this work, use the import list and deduction It works here with the 3.3 version of awesome from the debian unstable repositories. YMMV.

awesome_inotify_status.tgz