Battery status in tmux status bar in FreeBSD
============================================
Last edited: $Date: 2021/12/08 20:09:49 $
Ratpoison
---------
On my FreeBSD laptop I switched back from the i3 window
manager to the ratpoison window manager. I have been running
ratpoison for more than a decade and only switched to i3 about
two years ago. So, now I am back at ratpoison.
In ratpoison, I have no dock or permanent visible status bar.
tmux
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I start tmux from my `.xinitrc` so it is always running in my
first ratpoison window (window number zero). Most of the time
I am in this window.
So, the tmux status bar is a useful location for displaying
the battery status.
See also:
gopher://box.matto.nl/0/start_tmux_from_xinitrc.txt
Just enough information
-----------------------
I don't need much information to be shown in the status bar.
When the charger is connected, I want to know how far the
charging is.
When on battery, I want to know what the remaining battery
time is.
### Script
For this, I created a small script `~/bin/battery.sh``:
#!/bin/sh
STATE=`sysctl -n hw.acpi.battery.state`
if [ $STATE -eq 2 ]; then
echo "chg" $(sysctl hw.acpi.battery.life | cut -d : -f 2) "%"
else
echo "batt:" $(apm | grep time | head -n 1 | cut -d : -f 2,3) "h"
fi
### Format
This results in the following format:
- When the charger is connected: `chg 86 %`
- When on battery: `batt: 3:44 h`
For me, this is just enough.
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In `.tmux.conf` there is the following line:
set -g status-right "#(~/bin/battery.sh) | %A %d-%b-%y %H:%M"
This displays the battery status, the day of the week, the
date and the time (in 24 hours format) at the right side of
the status bar, like `chg 88 % | Saturday 04-Dec-21 21:40`.
Resources
---------
See also this page:
https://coderwall.com/p/bqw_tq/battery-status-in-tmux-status-bar
