i3blocks - with support for FreeBSD and OpenBSD

This is a fork of i3blocks that add support for FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

i3blocks is a highly flexible status line for the i3 window manager. It handles clicks, signals and language-agnostic user scripts.

The content of each block (e.g. time, battery status, network state, ...) is the output of a command provided by the user. Blocks are updated on click, at a given interval of time or on a given signal, also specified by the user.

It aims to respect the i3bar protocol, providing customization such as text alignment, urgency, color, and more.

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Here is an example of status line, showing the time updated every 5 seconds, the volume updated only when i3blocks receives a SIGRTMIN+10, and click events. Please note that this example will not work under OpenBSD since only SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 signals are supported.

[volume]
label=Volume:
command=amixer get Master | grep -E -o '[0-9]{1,3}?%' | head -1
interval=once
signal=10
# use 'pkill -RTMIN+10 i3blocks' after changing the volume

[time]
command=date '+%D %T'
interval=5

[clickme]
full_text=Click me!
command=echo button=$BLOCK_BUTTON x=$BLOCK_X y=$BLOCK_Y
min_width=button=1 x=1366 y=768
align=left

You can use your own scripts, or the ones provided with i3blocks. Feel free to contribute and improve them!

The default config will look like this:

The scripts provided by default may use external tools:

• mpstat (often provided by the sysstat package) used by cpu_usage.
• acpi (often provided by a package of the same name) used by battery.

Documentation

For more information about how it works, please refer to the manpage.

You can also take a look at the i3bar protocol to see what possibilities it offers you.

Installation

i3blocks may already be packaged for your distribution:

• Archlinux: i3blocks and i3blocks-git AURs.
• Gentoo: ebuild
• Debian: i3blocks and Ubuntu: i3blocks

For *BSD a port is on its way. You may also install i3blocks from source:

$ git clone git://github.com/tghelew/i3blocks
$ cd i3blocks
$ make clean debug # or make clean all
# make install

Note: the generation of the manpage in Linux requires the pandoc utility, packaged in common distributions as pandoc.

Usage

• Set your status_command in a bar block of your i3 config file:

  bar {
    status_command i3blocks
  }
  

• For customization, copy the default i3blocks.conf into ~/.i3blocks.conf (e.g. cp /etc/i3blocks.conf ~/.i3blocks.conf)

• Restart i3 (e.g. i3-msg restart)

Copying

i3blocks is Copyright (C) 2014 Vivien Didelot
See the file COPYING for information of licensing and distribution.