i3-battery-popup

A script that shows messages to the user when the battery is almost empty. I wrote this because I use i3wm, was frustrated by the lack of a nice battery notification, and as a nice exercise in shell scripting.

What it does

This script regularly checks your battery charge and shows you a nice warning in a popup if you are about to completely drain your battery. It improves on other battery warning scripts like this one by:

• Using a Tk-based popup (if you want) which you can configure to show on all workspaces. i3's nagbar doesn't do that.
• Or using a nice notify-send desktop notification
• Using the nagbar if you prefer that - or if you don't have Tk.
• Doing what you want: you can tell it at which battery percentages you want to be warned. Currently it will try to show you 2 messages before the lower limit is reached.
• Supporting multiple batteries. My laptop has 2 batteries, for example.
• Using sane file locking with flock.

How to use it

• Download the script and make sure it's on your PATH
• Call the script in your i3 config file: exec --no-startup-id i3-battery-popup

Installing on Arch Linux

There's now a package on Arch Linux's AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/i3-battery-popup-git

Showing the message everywhere

If you have wish installed this script will show you a popup window. To get wish, you probably need to install tk on your Linux distribution.

The nice thing is that we can make the popup window sticky; that doesn't work with i3-nagbar. To make the popup sticky so it shows everywhere, add this to your i3 config:

for_window [title="Battery Warning"] sticky enable

Desktop notification

Specify -n to use those nice pretty desktop notifications in the top right corner of your screen. I guess it depends on something like libnotify but I'm not really sure. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Options

• -L sets the percentage at which the first popup shows. Default is 10

• -l : The percentage at which the second popup shows. Default: half of the percentage given by -L

• -m : The message to show to the User

• -t : The time interval the script waits before checking the battery again. Give this a value in seconds: 10s, or in minutes: 5m. Default: 5m

• -n : Use notify-send for desktop notification

• -i : Specify the icon to use with -n

• -N : Don't use Tcl/Tk dialog. Use i3-nagbar.

Disclaimer

I have only just started using this script, so it is largely untested.