[infofeld] needs (another) major rewrite. My entire status bar does.
This was triggered by a post from [phillbush on nixers.net][p].
[infofeld]:
https://uninformativ.de/git/infofeld2/
[p]:
https://nixers.net/Thread-Unix-screen-shots-thread?pid=21397#pid21397
Originally, I just used lemonbar with katriawm. Lemonbar was rather
simple, much like dwm's status bar once was: You just pipe text into it.
while sleep 1; do date; done | lemonbar
That's nice if all you want to display is text. I copied this model when
I wrote [bevelbar] -- because lemonbar just didn't provide the correct
look when used together with katriawm.
[bevelbar]:
https://uninformativ.de/git/bevelbar/
A few months later I thought: It would be really nice to have little
info graphics, like CPU load or network traffic. I used to display that
as plain text, but that's just not great.
So, I added that function to bevelbar. But how? Do you pipe an image to
bevelbar? No, you write the path of an image file and bevelbar will
display it.
This works and it's reasonably fast since the images are so tiny, but
it's just not a great design. So many roundtrips. Also: How does the
widget know the available size? Bevelbar decides that, but it can't tell
the widget about it, so you have to set it manually in advance.
Once set up, this works, but meh.
Wouldn't it be nicer if the widget could draw to X11 directly?
So, as originally brought up by phillbush, WindowMaker's dockapps come
to mind. The entire status bar (including simple text areas) could be
made up by such dockapps.
The question is: Do I want to implement that? Dockapps have a little bit
of overhead and they usually run at a fixed size of 64x64. Do I want do
spend more time on X11 in the first place? Should I finally migrate to
Wayland?
Maybe I'll choose the easy way out, once more: Implement a status bar
system where widget draw to their own windows, but do it in the simplest
way possible. So I won't waste much time on it.
