General Integration

Mowedline's primary interface for updating the window contents is over the DBus session bus. The mowedline-client program is nothing more than a small DBus client that provides a nice command-line syntax for communicating with the mowedline server. You can in fact use any general DBus client to update mowedline and different ones may be better suited than others for integration with particular software.

You can for example update mowedline with the dbus-send utility that comes with DBus:

$ mowedline -q &
$ dbus-send --session --type=method_call \
    --dest=mowedline.server / mowedline.interface.update \
    string:default \
    string:"hello, world!"
$ dbus-send --session --type=method_call \
    --dest=mowedline.server / mowedline.interface.quit

Communicating with mowedline is done via DBus method-calls on the session bus. The other information that you have to provide is as follows:

The update method is the main method in the DBus interface for interacting with mowedline. It takes two arguments: a widget name and text to write to the widget. Some widget types take specially formatted text to work their magic.

Integrating mowedline with other software in the general case involves nothing more complicated than arranging for that software to call mowedline-client, dbus-send, or any other method of performing a DBus method call that the software may provide.

Methods for specific programs will be covered in other articles in this section. Feel free to contact us with your own methods of integrating mowedline with other programs.