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pekwm_panel overview

pekwm_panel is a simple panel application bundled with pekwm that aims to have a small core and be extensible using external scripts.

pekwm_panel integrates with the pekwm themes and aims to support pekwm specific window hints.

Configuration

The default configuration is placed in ~/.pekwm/panel and configures the widgets displayed, panel placement and external commands.

Panel

The panel section contains configuration for the panel itself.

Placement, place panel at the Top or Bottom of the head.

Head, if present place the panel on the given head (number) instead of spanning all heads.

Widgets

All widgets share two common configuration parameters.

Common configuration

Size

The Size parameter controls how much of the panel each widget is going to consume and can be specified in one of the units below.

Name Type Description
Pixels Integer Screen pixels, use only for fixed size widgets
Percent 1-100 Percent of total panel width
Required NA Calculated required width using the current theme
TextWidth String Width of the provided string using the current theme
* NA Use rest of available space, divided equally between all widgets with *

The configuration below would distribute the available 800 pixels as follows:

For simplicity space for the separators is excluded.

                          800px
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|  [1]  |    [Text]      |                 [ClientList]                    |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  100px       250px                           450px

Interval update interval in seconds

Widget: Bar

Display a partially filled bar, where the fill percent is read from a field extracted from an external command.

The fill percent should be a numeric value between 0.0 and 100.0, values below and and above will be set to 0.0 and 100.0 respectively.

If it is not possible to parse the value it will default to 0.0.

Example field output usable with the bar which will render the bar at 50%:

fill-percent 50

Widget configuration:

Bar = "field" {
  Size = "Pixels 32"
  Colors {
    Percent = "80" { Color = "#00ff00" }
    Percent = "40" { Color = "#ffff00" }
    Percent = "10" { Color = "#ff0000" }
  }
}

Widget: ClientList

Display a list of clients on the current workspace together with the client icon if _NET_WM_ICON is set.

Widget configuration:

ClientList {
  Size = "*"
}

Widget: Systray

Display system tray icons provided by programs like NetworkManager, VLC, etc.

Widget configuration:

Systray {
  Size = "Required"
}

The size of the widget will adapt to the number of icons in the tray.

Widget: DateTime

Display date and time using a strftime(3) format string.

Widget configuration:

DateTime = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M" {
  Size = "Required"
  Interval = "60"
}

Widget: Icon

Widget displaying an icon. The icon can be configured to update whenever a given external data field is updated.

Icon = "battery-icon-status" {
  Size = "Pixel 32"
  Icon = "battery.png"
  # If True, scale image square to panel height
  Scale = "False"
}

NOTE: The widget expects all icons set by the external data field to have the same size.

The Icon widget supports executing a command when it is clicked. To enable command execution add an Exec statement, the format of the command will be expanded the same way as the Text widget before being executed.

Widget: Text

Display formatted text. The format string can reference environment variables, external command data and specific window manager state variables.

The widget is updated whenever any field in the format string is updated.

It is recommended to use TextWidth for the Size parameter to handle font size differences between themes.

All format string variables start with %, the second character determine which type of data is referenced.

Variable Description
:CLIENT_NAME: Name of the active client
:WORKSPACE_NAME: Name of the active workspace
:WORKSPACE_NUMBER: Active workspace number

Widget configuration:

Text = "format string" {
  Size = "TextWidth _value_"
}

Transform

The Text and Icon widgets support transformation of the value of the field the widget is using. For the Text widget the formatted string is transformed.

The transformation can be used if the value of pre-defined fields, such as X11 atoms, requires some change before it can be used.

Transform takes the same form as TitleRules do in pekwm, and is configured using the Transform keyword.

Example using the _XKB_RULES_NAMES atom to display a keyboard language indicator in the panel. The _XKB_RULES_NAMES is a multi value string looking something like "evdev,pc105,us,,".

The below example shows the use of a transform, to display kbd-en.png, kbd-se.png etc. icon depending on the current keyboard layout.

Icon = "ATOM__XKB_RULES_NAMES" {
  Icon = "kbd.png"
  Transform = "/^[^,]*,[^,]*,([^,]*),.*/\\1/"
}

Commands

The Commands section of the panel configuration includes configuration for external commands which pekwm_panel will run at given intervals to collect data displayed by the Text and Bar widgets.

The commands run shall output data in the given format:

field[space]value

Example:

field1 value one
field2 value two

Long running commands

pekwm_panel parses data as it is output by the command and it is thus possible to have a single long-running command providing data for all widgets requiring external data.

It is recommended to use long-running commands if frequent updates of the displayed data is required.

A simple example displaying the current time every second without using the DateTime widget could look this:

date.sh

#!/bin/sh

while `/usr/bin/true`; do
    echo date `date`
    sleep 1
done

panel

Commands {
  Command = "/path/to/date.sh" {
    # time to wait between runs if date.sh crash
    Interval = "3600"
  }
}

Widgets {
  Text = "date" {
    Size = "TextWidth _Ddd Mmm 00 00:00:00 ZZZ YYYY_"
  }
}