dwmblocks

Modular status bar for dwm written in c.

Modifying blocks

The statusbar is made from text output from commandline programs. Blocks are added and removed by editing the config.h file.

Luke's build

I have dwmblocks read my preexisting scripts here in my dotfiles repo. So if you want my build out of the box, download those and put them in your $PATH. I do this to avoid redundancy in LARBS, both i3 and dwm use the same statusbar scripts.

Signaling changes

Most statusbars constantly rerun every script every several seconds to update. This is an option here, but a superior choice is giving your module a signal that you can signal to it to update on a relevant event, rather than having it rerun idly.

For example, the audio module has the update signal 10 by default. Thus, running pkill -RTMIN+10 dwmblocks will update it.

You can also run kill -44 $(pidof dwmblocks) which will have the same effect, but is faster. Just add 34 to your typical signal number.

My volume module never updates on its own, instead I have this command run along side my volume shortcuts in dwm to only update it when relevant.

Note that if you signal an unexpected signal to dwmblocks, it will probably crash. So if you disable a module, remember to also disable any cronjobs or other scripts that might signal to that module.

Clickable modules

Like i3blocks, this build allows you to build in additional actions into your scripts in response to click events. See the above linked scripts for examples of this using the $BLOCK_BUTTON variable.

For this feature to work, you need the appropriate patch in dwm as well. See here. Credit for those patches goes to Daniel Bylinka (daniel.bylinka@gmail.com).