Lemonaid - The friendly lemonbar helper

Do whatever you want with it, I don't care. Just don't drink it.

What is it?

Lemonaid is a bash script written to simplify the set up process of lemonbar. I am aware of other wrappers, like Captain, but they cannot be controlled with a shell script.

Why is it?

I wanted a wrapper which could load each status item asychronously, while reading the input from stdin instead of configuration files. This bash script streamlines the process of creating a status bar script. While it's relatively easy to set up a while true loop with a sleep 1 command, it really does not allow for a lot of options. What makes the setup difficult is to set up asynchonous loading of each status bar section (e.g. clock updates every second, while date only updates every minute)

How to use it?

lemonaid runs the script located at ~/.config/lemonbar/lemonbarrc, and compiles and prints the statusbar. When using lemonaid, think of it as a dictionary (named array or whatever) of status bar values, with the syntax key:value. It does not matter which keys are used, except for format wich holds the format of the status bar. The other status bar items can be accesed in format by their respective key wrapped in square brackets. Like this: format:%{c}[key] The status bar will update after any value has been modified (yes, even format)

Example lemonbarrc

#!/bin/sh
echo "format:%{r}[time]"
while true
do
  echo "time:$(date +'%T')"
  sleep 1
done

How does it work?

Dark bash magic.

Just kidding. Lemonbar uses a named pipe (fifo), into which the output of lemonbarrc is directed. Everytime the fifo recives input, it is loaded into a cache (the key/value pairs). Then the format is printed except that all the [key]s are substituted with their value

Sounds simple, but was decievingly hard to make.