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Wattbar

Wattbar is a minimalist battery charge monitor. It simply draws the battery level in a narrow strip along the bottom of the screen.

History

Wattbar is only the latest in a long line of battery monitors starting with YAMAGUCHI Suguru's xbattbar in 1998.

The original program has been updated by a number of different authors to support more modern hardware interfaces; the original APM was already getting replaced by ACPI in 2005, and the kernel interfaces to access ACPI information have changed significantly in the time since. Thus, in 2015, I (TQ Hirsch) rewrote the utility from scratch in Go; this version was called xbattbar3; to avoid kernel interface churn, I used UPowerd to access the battery charge status. (For the curious, I consider the ACPI version linked above to be xbattbar2, thus the next version is version 3)

In 2022, X has been starting to get a bit long in the tooth, and my laptop works far better with Wayland than X. Thus, it became time to rewrite it again; this new version needed a different name. "wbattbar" was the initial obvious choice, but leaving out the "b" made it a better pun. Aside from the fact that it renders to Wayland instead of X11, it should be a drop-in replacement for any of the previous versions of xbattbar.

Wattbar offers a modern Wayland replacement of xbattbar of a battery status monitoring UPowerd representing a bar that fills one side of the screen with a smooth change of selected colors that can be set in a cofiguration theme file.

Building from sources with RUST:

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/thequux/wattbar.git && cd wattbar

Compile using cargo:

cargo install --path ./

The binary is installed in $HOME/.cargo/bin/wattbar. Be sure is on $PATH.

Configuration:

Config file template is stored in $HOME/.config/wattbar/default.theme, copy/rename and create as many themes as you like. Inside this file you can setup three modesets for the battery to use depending on its status:

[status]
Charge_%	Color_code_representation	Background_color_code_representation

Status modes are: [charging], [discharging] and [nocharge] that activates the color of the bar when the battery reports any of this modes.

Colors can be set using plain RGB representation by #RRGGBB input color code mode or cilindrical HSL representation color code mode by hsl(Hue, Saturation_%, Lightness_%).

Wattbar also comes with gradient color transformation for both Color_code and Background_color that enables smooth color transformation between Charge_%'s segments.

If no Background color code is set, Wattbar automatically sets 50% darker color of the Color_code for the Background_color setting.

Examples of themes for a blueish-light

[charging]
0%	#0000FF
25%	#000044 #555588
50%	#000044	#EEEEFF
100%	#0000FF #FFDDFF

[discharging]
0%	#000044	#0000FF
25%	#FFFF00 #8888AA
50%	#000044
100%	#0000FF

[nocharge]
0%	#000044 #EEEEFF

and reddish-dark theme:

[charging]
0%	#FF00FF #220022
25%	#FFFF00 #880088
50%	#FF0000	#880000
100%	#FF00FF #880088

[discharging]
0%	#440000	#110011
25%	#FFFF00 #880000
50%	#FF0000
100%	#FF00FF

[nocharge]
0%	#AA0000 #440000

Flags:

Next combination of flags that can come in handy to personalize Wattbar even more:

Usage: wattbar [OPTIONS]

Options:

  • -b, --border <BORDER> Which border to draw the bar on. One of left, right, top, or bottom (or l,r,t, or b) [default: bottom]
  • -s, --size <SIZE> How many virtual pixels tall the bar should be [default: 3]
  • -r, --reverse Reverse the direction of the bar (i.e., right-to-left, or top-to-bottom)
  • -t, --theme <THEME> The theme to use. Passing a non-existent theme will tell you where wattbar looks [default: default]
  • -h, --help Print help
  • -V, --version Print version

To test discharging color change of the selected theme (or default if no theme is chosen), you can use the supersecretflag --mock-upower.