Pimp Your XMonad #1: Status bars

I’ve been hanging around in #xmonad for a long time, and two things have become clear. First, we answer a certain subset of questions many times. Most of the answers are in the FAQ, but the reality is that #xmonad tends to be more efficient, and it gives the answerers a means of procrastination more useful to society than reading whatever has hit reddit this minute.

Second, some relatively new user whose config is as he wants it will be hanging around in the channel when another new user asks if some feature exists. The first user says “I never even thought of something like this!” So I conceived the idea which eventually turned into this series of posts, a place for new users to discover features they never knew they were lacking.

Status bars

This arguably doesn’t belong, since it’s unlikely any user is going to reel in their jaw and say “I can get it to show me a list of workspaces?!” Don’t get me wrong, it’s an awesome feature, and I would get lost all the time without it, especially on a dual-head setup. But it might not belong since it’s a relatively easy-to-conceive feature.

Why should you use a status bar? Well, it will list all your currently populated workspaces (meaning those with at least one window on it, as well as those currently visible whether or not they have windows on), which can help with the “Oh, I forgot I sent this to workspace 8 six hours ago” problem. Using one of the pretty-printers (available for xmobar and dzen, with customizable behaviour) It highlights the currently focused workspace, as well as the other visible workspaces under a Xinerama setup. Also shown are the current layout, handy to avoid the “I forgot about these other windows because I was in Full” problem; and the window title, handy for the subtle jokes of some web comics, and… well I actually turned that one off.

Which status bar app?

xmonad users generally pick one of two: dzen2 and xmobar. The former is a general-purpose Do-It-Yourself status bar program, with sophisticated color and formatting directives that can be inlined in the input. It also supports XFT fonts and XPM icons. However, it is only an engine for displaying the input; you must write a program to generate the necessary input yourself. If that program is xmonad, the logHook in xmonad.hs, and XMonad.Log.DynamicLog‘s dynamicLogWithPP and dzenPP functions make that easy. If you want time, CPU usage, memory usage, etc., you’ll need to write your own script, with help from the dzen wiki.

xmobar, as the name hints, was designed for use with xmonad. Since xmonad doesn’t have any parts that run periodically, it can’t output a reliable time, or fresh CPU/memory/disk/network data to any status bar app. xmobar handles this itself, allowing the user to specify in a config file what information they want, and in what format it should appear.

Setting it up

With future articles, I intend to describe in more detail how to set up and get full use out of the features I’m discussing. In this case, though, the question is so frequently asked and answered in #xmonad that I’m going to punt. Either see John Goerzen’s excellent guide to setting up xmonad for its xmobar sections, or see that and replace xmobarPP with dzenPP, and remove the sTitle line from the example xmonad.hs seen there.