slstatus

slstatus is a suckless and lightweight status monitor for window managers which use WM_NAME as statusbar (e.g. DWM). It is written in pure C without any system() calls and only reads from files most of the time. It is meant as a better alternative to Bash scripts (inefficient) and Conky (bloated for this use).

If you write a bash script that shows system information in WM_NAME, it executes a huge amount of external command (top, free etc.) every few seconds. This results in high system resource usage. slstatus solves this problem by only using C libraries and/or reading from files in sysfs / procfs.

Looking at the LOC (lines of code) in the Conky project is very interesting: 28.346 lines C++, 219 lines Python and 110 lines Lua. slstatus currently has about 500 lines of clean, well commented C code and even includes additional possibilities as it can be customized and extended very easily. Configuring it by editing config.h (a C header file) is very secure and fast as no config files are parsed at runtime.

The following information is included:

battery percentage
cpu usage (in percent)
custom shell commands
date and time
disk numbers (free storage, percentage, total storage and used storage)
available entropy
username/gid/uid of current user
hostname
ip addresses
load average
ram numbers (free ram, percentage, total ram and used ram)
temperature
uptime
volume percentage + mute status (alsa)
wifi signal percentage and essid

Multiple entries per function are supported and everything can be reordered and customized via the C header file config.h (similar to DWM).

Usage

Installation

Before you continue, please be sure that a C compiler, GNU make and alsa-lib (for volume percentage) are installed. Then copy config.def.h to config.h and edit it to your needs. Recompile and install it after every change via sudo make install!

Starting

Put the following code in your ~/.xinitrc (or similar):

while true; do
	slstatus
done &

The loop is needed that the program runs after suspend to ram.

Contributing

In TODO.md there is a list of things that have to be done.

People who contributed are listed in CONTRIBUTORS.md.

For detailed information about coding style and restrictions see CONTRIBUTING.md

License

See LICENSE.

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