Lemonbar

lemonbar
is a lightweight bar based on
XCB
. It provides foreground/background color switching along with text alignment and colored under/overlining of text, full UTF-8 support and reduced memory footprint. Nothing less and nothing more.
Installation
Install
the
lemonbar
AUR
package.
Configuration
Configuration of lemonbar is now completely done via
screenrc
-like format strings and command line options as opposed to older versions, where configuration took place at compile-time.
See
lemonbar(1)
for a short overview of those configuration options.
Usage
lemonbar
prints no information on its own. To get any text into
lemonbar
you need to pipe text into it. The following example would write the text "Hello World" into your bar.
#!/bin/sh

# Echo the text
echo "Hello World"
If you want the text in
lemonbar
to update through a script, you need to add the
-p
option. This prevents
lemonbar
from exiting after stdin is closed.
Colors
lemonbar
uses the following commands to color the text, background or the under/overline. Colors can be specified via the formats
#RRGGBB
,
#AARRGGBB
(with an alpha channel; this requires a compositor to be running), or even
#RGB
.
The special color
-
indicates the default color (which is set by command-line flags, or is otherwise the default white text on a black background).
Command
Meaning
%{F
color
}
Use
color
as the foreground/font color
%{B
color
}
Use
color
as the background
%{U
color
}
Use
color
for under/overlining the text
Text alignment
lemonbar
also supports alignment of text. It uses the following commands to align the text
Command
Meaning
%{l}
Aligns the text to the left
%{c}
Aligns the text to the center
%{r}
Aligns the text to the right
Examples
The following example prints the date and time in the middle of the bar, the font's color being
yellow
and the background
blue
and changes the font/background color back to the default color afterwards. Run it with
/path/to/script/example.sh | lemonbar -p
example.sh
#!/bin/sh

# Define the clock
Clock() {
        DATETIME=$(date "+%a %b %d, %T")

        printf "$DATETIME"
}

# Print the clock

while true; do
        echo "%{c}%{F#FFFF00}%{B#0000FF} $(Clock) %{F-}%{B-}"
        sleep 1
done
Another example showing the battery percentage. To use this script you need to install
acpi
.
example.sh
#!/bin/sh

#Define the battery
Battery() {
        BATPERC=$(acpi --battery | cut -d, -f2)
        echo "$BATPERC"
}

# Print the percentage
while true; do
        echo "%{r}$(Battery)"
        sleep 1;
done
XFT fonts
The default lemonbar version does not support XFT fonts. To get support for XFT fonts, you need to install the
lemonbar-xft-git
AUR
fork.
To use different font with lemonbar, you need to pass
-f
option when starting lemonbar e.g.
lemonbar -f "Roboto Medium"
.
Font Awesome icons
With XFT support, you can also add
Font Awesome icons
to your bar. You need to install
woff2-font-awesome
before using the icons and pass
-f 'Font Awesome 6 Free' -f 'Font Awesome 6 Brands' -f 'Font Awesome 6 Free Solid'
(or the appropriate version instead of '6') to lemonbar. Please note, that you also need to specify one more font (e.g.
-f "Roboto Medium"
) to be used for other symbols than font awesome icons if you want something else visible in your lemonbar as font awesome does not contain other symbols.
Before adding an icon to lemonbar, you need to look up its unicode id on the
icon list
and pass it to lemonbar string. Here is a script that displays icon with Unicode id
f242
in lemonbar:
fontawesome.sh
#!/usr/bin/sh
echo -e "\uf242 Battery: 0"
Pay extra attention to
echo -e
flag, as it is necessary to properly use echo with escape sequences.
And corresponding lemonbar command:
lemonbar -f "Roboto Medium" -f 'Font Awesome 6 Free' -f 'Font Awesome 6 Brands' -f 'Font Awesome 6 Free Solid'