dwmstatusH is a port of dwmstatus from C into Haskell
For anyone who doesn't know, dwmstatus is an extremely lightweight status bar intended to accompany the dwm window manager. Dwmstatus was originally coded by Christoph Lohmann (20h@r-36.net) and can be found at http://git.suckless.org/dwmstatus. Many thanks to Christoph for writing a very nice, elegant status bar in C with extremely clear code. His work directly inspired mine. If dwmstatusH does not meet your needs as a status bar, you might try the original dwmstatus.
After one very very frustrating afternoon of trying to access the WM_NAME property of my X11 session's rootwindow in C, I threw my hands up in frustration. All I wanted was to get the property that was there, but no, C was extremely uncooperative.
I decided to give it a shot in Haskell because it's pretty and much easier to use than C or C++. After 45 to 60 minutes or so, I had achieved exactly what I wanted in Haskell, so I decided to try my hand at porting the basic functionality of dwmstatus from C to Haskell. Haskell's expressiveness and ability to deal with all the pointers necessary to programme with Xlib made it a wonderful choice for this project.
Several differences exist between dwmstatus and dwmstatusH.
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The language of implementation (C vs. Haskell)
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dwmstatus is right now more flexible, as it allows for the easy creation and display of multiple time zones. Right now, dwmstatusH displays the local time and UTC time.
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dwmstatusH is somewhat more memory intensive than dwmstatus. On my machine, it seems to take about 1400 KB of memory, while dwmstatus comes in around 350KB. I am not sure if I will be able to make it smaller, but for a first real prog like this, I am overall quite pleased.
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Terms of Licensure: dwmstatus is released under the MIT/Expat licence, while dwmstatusH is licensed under the GPLv3. As a learner and teacher, it is very important to me that my code always be available for anyone who wants to (try to) learn from it, hence the GPLv3.
Please feel free to contact me with questions or requests for functionality. This is mainly an experimental project, intended for my personal use in a minimal X11 environment, such as dwm. If anyone else can make use this code, I would love to hear about what you're doing with it!