thatguynoe/dwmblocks

My custom build of dwmblocks which updates blocks asynchronously.

dwmblocks

A dwm status bar that has a modular, async design, so it is always responsive.

Features

• Modular
• Lightweight
• Suckless
• Blocks:
  • Loaded asynchronously
  • Updates can be externally triggered
• Compatible with i3blocks scripts

Additionally, this build of dwmblocks is more optimized and fixes the flickering of the status bar when scrolling.

Why dwmblocks-async?

The magic of dwmblocks-async is in the async part. Since vanilla dwmblocks executes the commands of each block sequentially, it leads to annoying freezes. In cases where one block takes several seconds to execute, like in the mail and date blocks example from above, the delay is clearly visible. Fire up a new instance of dwmblocks and you'll see!

With dwmblocks-async, the computer executes each block asynchronously (simultaneously).

Usage

To set dwmblocks-async as your status bar, you need to run it as a background process on startup. One way is to add the following to ~/.xinitrc:

# The binary of `dwmblocks` is named `dwmblocks`
dwmblocks &

Modifying the blocks

You can define your status bar blocks in config.h:

const Block blocks[] = {
    ...
    BLOCK("volume", 0, 10),
    BLOCK("clock",  1, 1),
    ...
};

Each block has the following properties:

Property	Description
Command	The command you wish to execute in your block.
Update interval	Time in seconds, after which you want the block to update. If 0, the block will never be updated.
Update signal	Signal to be used for triggering the block. Must be a positive integer. If 0, a signal won't be set up for the block and it will be unclickable.

Signalling changes

Most status bars constantly rerun all scripts every few seconds. This is an option here, but a superior choice is to give your block a signal through which you can indicate it to update on relevant event, rather than have it rerun idly.

For example, the volume block has the update signal 10 by default. I run kill -44 $(pidof dwmblocks) alongside my volume shortcuts in dwm to only update it when relevant. Just add 34 to your signal number! You could also run pkill -RTMIN+10 dwmblocks, but it's slower.

To refresh all the blocks, run kill -10 $(pidof dwmblocks) or pkill -SIGUSR1 dwmblocks.

All blocks must have different signal numbers!

Installation

Clone this repository, modify config.h appropriately, then compile the program:

git clone https://github.com/thatguynoe/dwmblocks
cd dwmblocks
sudo make install