Mowedline

Mowedline is a status bar program for X, written in Chicken Scheme with XLib, Xft, and DBus. It was inspired by dzen2, and like that program, aims at an unobtrusive, minimalist look. It is based on a client/daemon design, where the daemon maintains one or more windows, and the client sends commands to the daemon over DBus to update the contents of those windows. A mowedline window is divided into widgets. Each widget has a unique name, by which the client can refer to it to update its contents.

Obtaining Mowedline

The source code can be obtained from my git repository. Please report any issues or feature requests you might have in the issue tracker.

Installing Mowedline

To install Mowedline you should use chicken-install -s mowedline. The -s switch tells chicken-install to use sudo to get root privileges.

For more detailed instructions and instructions to build from source see the installation page.

Project Status

June 19, 2016: Version 2.0.0 — mowedline now uses keywords instead of symbols to specify properties for widgets. See configuration to find out how to update your config.

June 12 2016: Version 1.0.0 — Add support for transparent window background. Add active-window-title widget, to show the title of the currently focused window. Consider a flex option of 0 to mean not to flex. Look at the XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable to find the configuration file, instead of always only looking at ~/.config/mowedline.

August 3, 2015: Version 0.2.8 — simplified configuration syntax; window margins; basic window transparency (non-compositing); mowedline can now be used as a library.

May 31, 2015: Version 0.2.7 — font support in markup; Emacs package, mowedline.el, for updating mowedline from Emacs.

February 9, 2013: Version 0.2pre2 — chicken-install mowedline.

January 29, 2013: Version 0.2pre1 — mowedline has been split into two programs, mowedline and mowedline-client, to address the problem of simultaneous multiple server starting, discussed here.

August 30, 2011: Xft, unicode, color, and more, all supported in mowedline 0.2pre.

August 26, 2011: Progress on writing Xft bindings for Chicken Scheme. They're not polished enough to release yet, but this will allow me to start experimenting with using Xft in mowedline.

March 24, 2011: Mowedline 0.1 The program now has the minimum feature set to be considered useful, though much work remains to be done.

License

Mowedline is licensed under the terms of GPL3.