Other Status bar for dwl (Wayland)

[scottro]

In another thread https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/...a-lot-of-stuff-on-configuring-alacritty.94434 I asked about a status bar for dwl that is like that of dwm.

It seems that there is now a patch that will do at least some of it. The dwl patches section at https://codeberg.org/dwl/dwl-patches/src/branch/main/patches has a bar patch that will probably work on FreeBSD, so far I've only tried it on Fedora, where I downloaded the dwl-0.7.tgz and the bar patch, applied it and it worked. That still doesn't, at least not where someone with my limited knowledge can see, a way to have the date up there. However, there is a second patch, bar-systray, that seems as if it might work. I'll probably try it on Fedora tomorrow, as it's been a long day for various silly reasons. Not sure how, even if I got it working on Fedora, I'd be able to get it all working in FreeBSD, though I suspect someone with more knowledge than I have could.

On the other hand, as far as having time/date at top of the page, NapoleonWils0n's suggestion of tmux (did he mention the status bar at top of tmux, or was that my idea?) will certainly work. As things stand, on my main workstation, I can't get wayland working with the NVidia card, and don't really need it. I'm pretty old, so I suspect X will be around longer than I will be. And even the laptop, I mostly use it to watch videos, because it seems smoother than X, and with dwl, I can use wlr-randr to just turn off the laptop display, or, if I want to use dwl, put it in floating mode, drag the mpv window till it goes off the laptop screen and shows up on the TV. So, my issues are definitely First World Problems. It's more that I'd just like to be able to do it. I haven't yet tried putting the bar patch in dwl files, but probably will this week. To use it, you start dwl with

 slstatus -s dwl

and like the dwm bar, it will show the different tags and show what program window is focused, as well as show the icons that dwm people know, to show if you are in floating, tiled, or monacle mode. In Fedora at least, when I run that slstatus -s |dwl, I do get a message that slstatus is not found or unknown, or something (too lazy to open the laptop and check the exact message), but despite that, the status bar runs and does what it should.

As far as adding the date, even with dwm, that is done through an xsetroot command, for example

while true; do xsetroot -name "$(date +"%R %F")";sleep 1m;done &

To sum up, those who are using dwl and would like a status bar like dwm's, this bar patch is really nice, and does everything a dwm bar would do (save run any xsetroot commands)

 

[scottro]

Ok, I tried to apply the patch, but there is a file to be patched drwl.h that is apparently not in the FreeBSD version, so the patch fails as it can't find said drwl.h. That being said, dwlb, available as a package, also gives a status bar, and seems to do all the that the bar patch does, save you do need the bar patch to do the bar-systray patch.

 

[scottro]

And last follow up since at least 2 people have noticed this. I tried, on Fedora, to install the bar-systray patch, but, probably due to my own mistakes, rather than the writers of the patch, was unable to get it working. So, after all this, I think I'm going to do as NapoleonWils0n suggested in the other thread, use dwlb, which at least shows different tags (dwm's and dwl's equivalent, more or less, to workspaces) and does show apps are running, and when you focus on a window, will show that app's name at the top. (App can't be the right word, sounds like a phone) and also shows by icon if you're in floating, tiled or mono mode. And, also shamelessly copying him, use tmux to have a time on screen. I could, instead, use waybar which would show the time, but wouldn't show the tags, so since neither is perfect for, again, my somewhat limited use, I'll use dwlb. One calls it as you start dwl, with dwl -s dwlb and it's fine for my use. I suspect that eventually, someone will develop a bar that can do the wayland equivalent of xsetroot, but it's not here yet, as near as I can tell.