tmux-powerline

Note - this is shamelessly taken from https://github.com/erikw/tmux-powerline, but with updates to make it my very own

This is a set of scripts (segments) for making a nice and dynamic tmux statusbar where elements can come and disappears depending on events. I really like the look of Lokaltog/vim-powerline and I decided I wanted the same for tmux.

The following segments exists for now:

• LAN & WAN IP addresses.
• Now Playing for MPD, Spotify (GNU/Linux native or wine, OS X), iTunes (OS X), Rhythmbox, Banshee, MOC, and Audacious.
• New mail count for GMail, Maildir and Apple Mail.
• GNU/Linux and Macintosh OS X battery status (uses richo/dotfiles/bin/battery).
• Weather in Celsius, Fahrenheit and Kelvin using Yahoo Weather.
• System load, cpu usage and uptime.
• Git, SVN and Mercurial branch in CWD.
• Date and time.
• Hostname.
• tmux info.
• CWD in pane.
• Current X keyboard layout.

Check segments/ for more undocumented segments and details.

Screenshots

Full screenshot

left-status

Current tmux session, window and pane, hostname and LAN & WAN IP address.

right-status

New mails, now playing, average load, weather, date and time.

Now I've read my inbox so the mail segment disappears!

After pausing the music there's no need for showing NP anymore. Also the weather has become much nicer!

Remaining battery.

Requirements

Requirements for the lib to work are:

• Recent tmux version
• bash --version >= 4.0
• A patched font. Follow instructions at Lokaltog/vim-powerline/fontpatcher or download a new one. However you can use other substitute symbols as well; see config.sh.

Segment Requirements

Requirements for some segments. You only need to fullfill the requirements for those segments you want to use.

• WAN IP: curl, bc
• MPD now playing: libmpdclient
• xkb_layout: X11, XKB
• GMail count: wget.

OS X specific requirements

You still need to follow the first part of these instructions even if you are running zsh or something else as your default shell!

tmux-powerline uses associative arrays in bash, which were added in bash version 4.0. OS X Lion ships with an antiquated version of bash ( run bash --version to see your version). In order to use tmux-powerline, you need to install a newer version of bash, fortunately, brew makes this very easy. If you don't have brew, install it. Then follow these steps:

$ brew install bash

If you're using something other than bash (or if you don't want this newer version of bash as your default shell) you should be done now. If something seems broken, try following the last two steps and see if it helps:

$ sudo bash -c "echo /usr/local/Cellar/bash/%INSTALLED_VERSION%/bin/bash >> /private/etc/shells"
$ chsh -s /usr/local/Cellar/bash/%INSTALLED_VERSION%/bin/bash

The first command installs bash through brew, the second registers the new shell with the system and the third changes to the new shell for your user. If you later upgrade bash through brew, don't forget to do the last two steps again with the new version number. After doing the above and restarting your terminal, running echo $SHELL should result in the following:

$ echo $SHELL
/usr/local/Cellar/bash/%INSTALLED_VERSION%/bin/bash

Installation

Just check out the repository with:

$ cd ~/some/path/
$ git clone git://github.com/erikw/tmux-powerline.git

Now edit your ~/.tmux.conf to use the scripts:

set-option -g status on
set-option -g status-interval 2
set-option -g status-utf8 on
set-option -g status-justify "centre"
set-option -g status-left-length 60
set-option -g status-right-length 90
set-option -g status-left "#(~/path/to/tmux-powerline/status-left.sh)"
set-option -g status-right "#(~/path/to/tmux-powerline/status-right.sh)"

Set the maximum lengths to something that suits your configuration of segments and size of terminal (the maximum segments length will be handled better in the future). Don't forget to change the PLATFORM variable in config.sh or your ~/.bashrc to reflect your operating system of choice.

Also I recommend you to use the tmux-colors-solarized theme (as well as solarized for everything else :)):

source ~/path/to/tmux-colors-solarized/tmuxcolors.conf

Some segments e.g. cwd and cvs_branch needs to find the current working directory of the active pane. To achive this we let tmux save the path each time the shell prompt is displayed. Put the line below in your ~/.bashrc or where you define you PS1 variable. zsh users can put it in e.g. ~/.zshrc and may change PS1 to PROMPT (but that's not necessary).

PS1="$PS1"'$([ -n "$TMUX" ] && tmux setenv TMUXPWD_$(tmux display -p "#I_#P") "$PWD")'

You can toggle the visibility of the statusbars by adding the following to your ~/.tmux.conf:

bind C-[ run '~/path/to/tmux-powerline/mute_statusbar.sh left'		# Mute left statusbar.
bind C-] run '~/path/to/tmux-powerline/mute_statusbar.sh right'		# Mute right statusbar.

Configuration

Edit the two status scripts to suit you needs. A number of common segments are included that covers some general functions like time, date, battery etc. The segments can be moved around and does not needs to be in the order (or same file) as they are now. It should be quite easy to add you own segments.

$ $EDITOR ~/path/to/tmux-powerline/status-left.sh
$ $EDITOR ~/path/to/tmux-powerline/status-right.sh

Here is one segment configuration explained so you'll know how to make you own.

declare -A time 								# The name of the array.
time+=(["script"]="${segments_path}/time.sh")	# mandatory, the shell script producing the output text to be shown.
time+=(["foreground"]="colour136")				# mandatory, the text foreground color.
time+=(["background"]="colour235")				# mandatory, the text background color.
time+=(["separator"]="${separator_left_thin}")	# mandatory, the separator to use. Can be (as described in `lib.sh`) any of separator_(left|right)_(bold|thin)
time+=(["separator_fg"]="default")				# optional, overrides the default blending coloring of the separator with a custom colored foreground.
register_segment "time"							# Registers the name of the array declared above.

Debugging

Some segments might not work on your system for various reasons such as missing programs or different versions not having the same options. If a segment fails the printing should be aborted. To investigate further why a segment fails you can run

$ bash -x ~/path/to/failing/segment.sh

To see all output even if some segment fails you can set DEBUG_MODE="true" in config.sh.

Common problems

VCS_branch is not updating

The issue is probably that the update of the current directory in the active pane is not updated correctly. Make sure that your PS1 or PROMPT variable actually contains the line from the installation step above by simply inspecing the output of echo $PS1. You might have placed the PS1 line in you shell confugration such that it is overwritten later. The simplest solution is to put it at the very end to make sure that nothing overwrites it. See issue #52.

Hacking

This project can only gain positively from contributions. Fork today and make your own enhancments and segments to share back!