perspektiv (engl. spotting scope) is designed to be a lightweight userland daemon for graphically reporting system events such as monitor brightness changes, audio volume changes etc.
I created perspektiv to go hand in hand with the hotkey setup on my laptop: I wanted something that fits well with the graphical theme of my system, was lightweight to comfortably have running as a daemon in the background, and was hackable enough to easily add functionality as I desired.
However, this means that perspektiv only has stuff that I myself cared about enough to implement. Currently, that's just the following:
- Monitor brightness with X11/RandR
- Audio volume/mute with ALSA
There's also the feature/rfkill branch with a proof-of-concept for an rfkill
module, i.e. for stuff like
- Bluetooth toggle
- Wifi toggle
If there are any additional things that you would like to have, you can easily implement them yourself! See the contributing guide for more information and hopefully enough documentation to get you started.
perspektiv has been tested on Arch Linux. Your milage might vary on other distrubutions, although I believe that the core of perspektiv should work regardless of what platform you're on (as long as you're using linux).
Icons are currently based on Font Awesome 4.7.0. Some distributions have a package for Font Awesome:
| Distro | Package Name |
|---|---|
| Arch Linux | ttf-font-awesome-4 in the AUR |
| Ubuntu, Debian | fonts-font-awesome |
If your distro is not listed, it might still have a package that I simply don't
know about. Else, you can just download the OTF or TTF
file (in the zip
file as fonts/FontAwesome.otf or fonts/FontAwesome-webfont.ttf) and drop it
into your fonts directory (probably something like /usr/share/fonts/<TTF or OTF>). If you're not sure whether to use the OTF or TTF file, go with the OTF
file.
For x86_64, prebuilt binaries are available in the gh-pages branch:
git clone https://github.com/henriklaxhuber/perspektiv && cd perspektiv
git checkout gh-pagesChoose the binary that includes the modules you wish to run.
-
Build Dependencies:
- Get a stable rust compiler from rustup
- Install GTK+3 shared libraries and development files (
libgtk-3-devon ubuntu) - Install libc6 dev library (
libc6-devon ubuntu) - For the
x11_backlightmodule, installlibxrandr-dev(ubuntu) or your distro's equivalent - For the
alsa_volumemodule, installlibasound2-dev(ubuntu) or your distro's equivalent
-
Building:
git clone https://github.com/henriklaxhuber/perspektiv && cd perspektiv
cargo build --release --features "feature_list"where feature_list is a space-separated list of the modules that you would
like to include. You can pick from the following modules:
x11_backlight: Show a popup with the monitor brightness when it is changedalsa_volume: Show a popup with the current volume or mute status when they are changed- (PoC)
rfkill: Any rfkill block/unblock event. Support is experimental; you need to checkout the branchfeature/rfkillto build the module.
The binary will be created as ./target/release/perspektiv.
Drop the binary file into your $PATH somewhere (for a system-wide installation,
something like /bin will probaly work well). You must still configure your
display manager to start perspektiv once you log in! Make sure you don't run
perspektiv as root.
Note that runnning perspektiv for the first time will create a default
configuration file under ~/.config/perspektiv.
perspektiv aims to be heavily customizable so that it fits on any system with any design. This is partially achieved by using GTK to integrate well with the system theme. But not everything can be done with CSS, and not every GTK theme works well for perspektiv. This is why you have the toml configuration file at your disposal, where you can:
- Set custom CSS files
- Change dimensions such as width, padding, margins, and more
- Change how information is presented
See the default configuration file for more information on how to do that.