honeybee is a port of the original i3status written in Rust. This was meant to be a learning exercise and for my personal use. It's still lacking lots of functionality and proper error handling / robustness, so use it at your own peril.

Motivation

My main motivation is to practice Rust and use more advanced patterns and constructs. I use i3 as a Window Manager, and while searching for a replacement of the default i3status I thought it could actually be a good idea to write my own. I've read the entire source code of the original one (which is written in C) and used it as a starting point. Eventually, I came across i3status-rust, which I used as source of inspiration for some idiomatic ways of writing certain parts in Rust, namely proper error handling and macros.

Getting started

You can download a pre-compiled version from the releases page. Alternatively, if you have Rust installed, you can clone the repository and run cargo install.

Configuration

Once installed, you can edit the sample configuration file and copy it to one of the following locations:

1. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/honeybee/config.toml
2. $XDG_DATA_HOME/honeybee/config.toml
3. $HOME/.honeybee.toml
4. $XDG_DATA_DIRS/honeybee/config.toml
5. $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/honeybee/config.toml

One of the main differences between the original i3status and honeybee is that the latter uses TOML format.

General configuration

At the top-level, you can define the following configuration variables:

Variable	Description	Values	Default
output_format	Defines the format string used for the output	i3bar, term, xmobar, lemonbar, dzen2	i3bar
colors	Will disable all the colors if set to false	true, false	true
separator	Separator to use between modules. Set to empty string if you want to disable.
color_separator	Color used to paint the separator bar between modules.	Canonical RGB hexadecimal triplet (with no separator between colors), prefixed by #
color_good	Color used to display good values.	Same as above	#00FF00
color_degraded	Color used to display degraded values.	Same as above	#FFFF00
color_bad	Color used to display bad values.	Same as above	#FF0000
markup	When set to pango, you'll be able to use Pango markup and specify font, color, size, etc, in the format strings.	pango, none	none
update_interval	Time, in seconds, that modules will sleep until they update their values. Can be overwritten on a per module basis.	Integer (represents seconds)	10

Modules

Just like in the original i3status, the basic idea of honeybee is that you can specify which modules should be used.

Modules are specified in the configuration TOML as an array:

[[module]]
module = "module_name"
property1 = "value1"

You can consult the documentation for details on how to configure the modules.

Module	Status	Notes
Battery	✔️	Only Linux supported atm
Disk	✔️
File Contents	✔️
Load Average	✔️
Memory	✔️
Path exists	✔️
Run watch	✔️
Time	✔️
Timezone	✔️
Volume	✔️	Only ALSA supported atm
Wireless Info	✔️	Only Linux supported atm
CPU Temperature	❌
CPU usage	❌
Date	❌
Ethernet	❌
IPv6 Address	❌

Output format

The original i3status supports several output formats, which determine the format string used in its output. The following table shows the output formats supported by i3status and which ones have been migrated already:

Output format	Status
i3bar	✔️
dzen2	🚧
xmobar	🚧
lemonbar	🚧
term	🚧

You can check the documentation for more information about output formats.

Command-line options

honeybee --help

Roadmap

You can follow the open issues to see what I'm planning to work on. The main objective is to port the original i3status completely. Later, I'll probably enhance it with extra features.

References

• bumblebee-status - I came across this project when I started doing some research. I tried it out, it looks really nice, but it consumes way more resources than I wanted. I used it as an inspiration mostly for the name.
• i3status - the original one.
• i3status-rust - helped rewrite certain parts in more idiomatic Rust.
• procfs - source of inspiration for the memory module. I decided to not use this crate because it maintains way more info in memory than I need.
• tokio
• serde
• clap