8bitmcu / dwmblocks-async

fork of dwmblocks-async with a config file!

dwmblocks-async - dwm status bar (fork)

dwmblocks-async (original) is a dwm status bar that has a modular, async design, so it is always responsive. Imagine i3blocks, but for dwm.

This fork adds a configuration file for the blocks. Check out blocks.toml!

Requirements

• dwm patched with statuscmd.

Building and installing

1. clone this repository locally on your machine
2. run make clean && sudo make install from within the repository folder
3. copy and edit the config file: cp /etc/dwm/blocks.toml $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/dwm/blocks.toml

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-async` is named `dwmblocks`
dwmblocks &

Signaling 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 5 by default. I run kill -39 $(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+5 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!

Clickable blocks

Like i3blocks, this build allows you to build in additional actions into your scripts in response to click events. You can check out my status bar scripts as references for using the $BLOCK_BUTTON variable.

To use this feature, set clickable_blocks to 1 in your config file