mjkillough / Cnx
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Cnx —
A simple X11 status bar for use with simple WMs.
Cnx doesn't rely on functionality from any specific WM, instead preferring to get its data from generic properties defined in EWMH. If your WM implements enough of EWMH, it should work with Cnx.
Features
Cnx is written to be customisable, simple and fast.
Where possible, it prefers to asynchronously wait for changes in the underlying
data sources (and uses mio
/tokio
to achieve this), rather than periodically
calling out to external programs.
There are currently these widgets available:
- Active Window Title — Shows the title (EWMH's
_NET_WM_NAME
) for the currently focused window (EWMH's_NEW_ACTIVE_WINDOW
). - Pager — Shows the WM's workspaces/groups, highlighting whichever is
currently active. (Uses EWMH's
_NET_DESKTOP_NAMES
,_NET_NUMBER_OF_DESKTOPS
and_NET_CURRENT_DESKTOP
). - Sensors — Periodically parses and displays the output of the sensors provided by the system.
- Volume - Shows the current volume/mute status of the default output device.
- Battery - Shows the remaining battery and charge status.
- Clock — Shows the time.
The [Sensors
], [Volume
] and [Battery
] widgets require platform
support. They currently support Linux (see dependencies below) and OpenBSD.
Support for additional platforms should be possible.
How to use
Cnx is a library that allows you to make your own status bar.
In normal usage, you will create a new binary project that relies on the cnx
crate, and customize it through options passed to the main Cnx
object and
its widgets. (It's inspired by QTile
and dwm
, in that the configuration
is done entirely in code, allowing greater extensibility without needing complex
configuration handling).
An simple example of a binary using Cnx is:
use cnx::text::*;
use cnx::widgets::*;
use cnx::{Cnx, Position};
fn main() -> Result<()> {
let attr = Attributes {
font: Font::new("Envy Code R 21"),
fg_color: Color::white(),
bg_color: None,
padding: Padding::new(8.0, 8.0, 0.0, 0.0),
};
let mut cnx = Cnx::new(Position::Top);
cnx.add_widget(ActiveWindowTitle::new(attr.clone()));
cnx.add_widget(Clock::new(attr.clone()));
cnx.run()?;
Ok(())
}
A more complex example is given in src/bin/cnx.rs
alongside the project.
(This is the default [bin]
target for the crate, so you could use it by
either executing cargo run
from the crate root, or even running cargo install cnx; cnx
. However, neither of these are recommended as options for customizing
Cnx are then limited).
Before running Cnx, you'll need to make sure your system has the required dependencies.
Dependencies
In addition to the Rust dependencies in Cargo.toml
, Cnx also depends on these
system libraries:
x11-xcb
-
xcb-util
:xcb-ewmh
/xcb-icccm
/xcb-keysyms
pango
cairo
pangocairo
The following Ubuntu packages should allow your system to meet these requirements:
apt-get install libx11-xcb-dev libxcb-ewmh-dev libpango1.0-dev libcairo2-dev
If the volume-widget
feature is enabled (and it is by default), you will
also need alsa-lib
on Linux:
apt-get install libasound2-dev
Tests
Unfortunately there aren't many. You can run what's here with:
cargo test
License
MIT