emotd - a simple awesome widget that helps you develop your emotional literacy

emotd is a simple and sweet widget for the awesome X11 window manager. It displays a feeling word, picked at random from a user-defined text file, in your awesome status bar.

You can set the word to another random word by simply clicking on the widget. The idea is that you can cycle through different words until you find one that describes your current mood. Right-clicking brings you back through the history.

emotd stands for "emotion of the day". Credits to my dad for finding this name.

installation

Once you have the code somewhere on your filesystem, installing is easy.

1. Copy[1] the .emotd_words file to your home folder (~).
2. Your rc.lua awesome config file is, by default, found in the ~/.config/awesome/ directory. In that directory, create a subdirectory (e.g. my-widgets).
3. Copy[1] the emotd.lua file to that directory.
4. Edit your rc.lua file according to the following directives (-- ... denotes an ellipsis):

-- ...
-- put this at the top of the document, near the other `require` statements
local widget_emotd = require("my-widgets.emotd")
-- ...
-- there should be a line like the following somewhere in your rc.lua
awful.screen.connect_for_each_screen(function(s)
-- ...
    s.mywibox:setup {
    -- ...
      { -- Right widgets
          -- the following line is there in the default rc.lua
          layout = wibox.layout.fixed.horizontal,
          -- add your emotd widget right here to have it appear at the
          -- left of the right-aligned section of your status bar
          widget_emotd(), -- that's all you need for a default emotd configuration
          -- ...

6. [optional] See the arguments section to change the emotd configuration.

[1]: you may, instead, create a symlink to the emotd.lua file that lies in your cloned repository (and eventually do the same for a words file found somewhere else on your filesystem). This is useful if you intend on making modifications to the widget's source. To do this, run the following command with the adequate folder name:

$ ln -sv <your-repository-location>/emotd.lua ~/.config/awesome/my-widgets/emotd.lua

what is emotional literacy?

This widget was greatly inspired by the EQI.org website, which defines emotional literacy as

The ability to express feelings with specific feeling words, in 3 word sentences. (S. Hein, 1996)

Being able to express our own feeling is important for mental health. Being able to finally word out an emotion we have been struggling for some time is often, in of itself, a relief. But more importantly, emotional literacy lets us identify patterns in the evolution of our emotions, as well as the life conditions (social, work/studies-related, etc.) that lead to the reproduction of these patterns. This, in turn, allows us to better develop strategies that seek to either reproduce or avoid these conditions.

As any skill, emotional literacy can be practiced. This is where emotd may help: throughout your day, whenever you put your eyes on your status bar, you may choose to cycle through a few words until you find one that fits your current mood. You can phrase out the 3-word sentence "I feel <word>" in your head to see if it really does seem like the right word. Repeating this process throughout your day will increase your familiarity with the handling of feeling words, thereby improving your emotional literacy.

words file

The default location of the words file is ~/.emotd_words. You can change this location via the arguments. A sample words file, shamelessly copied from this webpage, is given in this repository.

Your contents of the words file should follow this syntax:

• one word (can include whitespace) per line
• empty lines are ignored
• lines whose first non-whitespace character is # are treated as comments and ignored

history

emotd allows you to cycle back through the history of the words that appeard in the widget in this session, by right-clicking instead of left-clicking on the widget. This is meant to let you skim through words quickly without having to worry about inadvertently clicking away from a word that you liked. By default only a few words are remembered by default, but you can change this amount via the arguments.

arguments/settings

When calling emotd from your rc.lua configuration file, you can customize some aspects of its behaviour by passing a table as a parameter to the emotd call. If this table is omitted, the default settings will be used.

table index	default value	explanation
words_file	~/.emotd_words	the file containing the feeling words
prefix	""	a prefix that will appear before the word displayed in the widget
suffix	""	a suffix that will appear after the word displayed in the widget
hist_count	10	the number of words kept in history

Here is an example of a custom emotd call in rc.lua:

-- ...
widget_emotd({
    prefix = "| ",
    suffix = " |",
    hist_count = 20,
}),
-- ...