[HN Gopher] Xbar: The BitBar reboot. Put anything in your macOS ...
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Xbar: The BitBar reboot. Put anything in your macOS menu bar
Author : rjmunro
Score : 181 points
Date : 2021-03-19 12:25 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (xbarapp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (xbarapp.com)
| wrink wrote:
| Site is down :c 503
| psychometry wrote:
| I like that they have some to show the number of unread Slack
| notifications, but the scripts are necessarily kind of hacky in
| order to deal with rate-limiting. It's ridiculous that Slack
| doesn't have such a feature built-in because people have been
| asking for it for years.
| tyingq wrote:
| Doesn't fix it, but supposedly there's an undocumented api
| endpoint here:
| https://api.slack.com/api/client.counts?token=token_here
|
| It will return "has_unreads=true" for channels that have unread
| notifications. So perhaps better than a naive brute force
| traversal.
| aquir wrote:
| It would be awesome to find something similar to windows...I can
| imagine "boosting up" my taskbar with this kind of stuff. If
| anyone knows a similar app to Windows please let us know
| st0le wrote:
| Rainmeter is the closest thing to it.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Just updated from BitBar and ran into a small issue since xbar
| doesn't support custom plugin folders the same way BitBar did (as
| in a way to change it via the GUI). Thankfully you can just
| symlink the plugin folder to your old BitBar folder and
| everything works as expected. I opened an issue for it here:
| https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/653
| sebastianmarkow wrote:
| http://www.hammerspoon.org/
| permalac wrote:
| What do you use it for?
|
| How does it compare to keyboard maestro?
| DandyDev wrote:
| How does it compare to Swiftbar[0]? Any reasons to use Xbar over
| SwiftBar given that the latter was built with a stack that is
| more "native" to Mac than Golang?
|
| [0] https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar
| sdfhbdf wrote:
| UPDATE: XBar is a reboot by the original creator of BitBar [2].
| I understood it as I was confused why I have it in my starred.
| The below is my analysis before I understood it.
|
| UPDATE 2: The authors of both also were considering to merge
| the projects. [3]
|
| I see XBar seems to be more advanced and more popular.
|
| It has these Advanced APIs like URL schema [0].
|
| and also the GUI for plugins compared to Swiftbar
|
| The tech stack of course is also much different as it's written
| in Go and Swiftbar as the name applies in Swift.
|
| Although I like that SwiftBar has cron syntax support [1]. I
| didn't find a similar function in XBar.
|
| A comprehensive comparison in one or the other's repo README
| could be useful
|
| [0]: https://github.com/matryer/xbar#advanced-apis
|
| [1]: https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar#refresh-schedule
|
| [2]: https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/607
|
| [3]:
| https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/607#issuecomment-7752...
| jonpurdy wrote:
| I was wondering about why SwiftBar existed when there was
| already BitBar, and a lot is explained in this thread on
| Github: https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar/issues/95
|
| TL;DR: BitBar stopped working well in Big Sur and the old code
| base was increasingly hard to update and build.
| eddyg wrote:
| This was the first question that came to mind for me too.
| xbar wrote:
| Sup.
| m12k wrote:
| I've been discovering more and more high quality open source apps
| for Mac recently. My other favorites so far:
|
| https://github.com/iterate-ch/cyberduck
|
| https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
|
| https://github.com/sfsam/Itsycal
|
| https://github.com/newmarcel/KeepingYouAwake
| tylerritchie wrote:
| KeepingYouAwake is nice (and I'm not about to pretend the
| following solution is good for everyone), however, I've found
| on the last couple of McBook fresh installs using caffeinate
| [1] from the terminal is sufficient.
|
| I usually have a terminal open anyway and `caffeinate -d -t
| 999999` usually does what I want (stay awake until I come back
| and tell you to go to sleep). Usually it's two keystrokes away
| (up arrow, enter), if not, that's quick enough to type for my
| purposes. That said, it's a bad approach if you want to suggest
| it as a tool for someone's workflow who _doesn't_ have a
| terminal open all of the time.
|
| [1] https://ss64.com/osx/caffeinate.html
| uncledave wrote:
| I tend to use caffeinate to wrap scripts only. I want it to
| go to sleep and stop eating all my electricity when it's
| done.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| You can omit the -t and it will run forever.
| weaksauce wrote:
| you can throw an alias in your .bashrc or .zshrc and have it
| even easier...
|
| alias caffeine="caffeinate -d -t 999999"
| raju wrote:
| Along the same vein, this was posted a little while back on HN
| which lists a few other ones that I have found useful.
|
| https://onethingwell.org/
| 9935c101ab17a66 wrote:
| I'm a huge, huge fan of hammerspoon. It's replaced so many
| other small utilities for me.
| justwalt wrote:
| When I started using a Mac for work, the fact that so much
| functionality which is available free on Linux was now locked
| behind a paywall in the App Store was frustrating.
|
| Hammerspoon gave me basically all of it back, in a scriptable
| form which makes it much better suited to what I want. It's
| truly great software.
| aquir wrote:
| CyberDuck is amazing! (MountainDuck also) Thanks for
| recommending mate
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I've been using CyberDuck since PowerPC 10.5. I don't open it
| much any more because sftp feels like it takes less effort
| (despite the lack of autocomplete on Mac) but I do keep it
| installed. I can also vouch for ItsyCal, another one of the
| first things I install on a fresh Mac.
| michaelmior wrote:
| Thanks for this! I was going to mention Spectacle[0], but I'll
| see that it's no longer maintained. I'll have to check out
| Rectangle :)
|
| EDIT: I see Rectangle is based on Spectacle!
|
| [0] https://www.spectacleapp.com/
| thamer wrote:
| I also used to run Spectacle and was worried about it no
| longer working at some point (like after a macOS upgrade).
|
| Rectangle is all that Spectacle was - same default key
| bindings - and more.
| [deleted]
| post_break wrote:
| It's not open source but this is one of my favorites:
| https://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/Software/IPinmenubar.shtm...
| deanclatworthy wrote:
| This can be done using xbar, trivially.
| bajsejohannes wrote:
| I can't find any reasons why it was rewritten.
|
| Was it C before? (I can't tell, because
| https://github.com/matryer/bitbar redirects to xbar)
| spurgu wrote:
| Objective-C:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210118051718/https://github.co...
| ihuman wrote:
| The old repo is archived in the new one
| https://github.com/matryer/xbar/tree/master/archive/bitbar
| jjice wrote:
| Bitbar-esque tools are fantastic. There are a wide variety on
| Linux, watching with slightly different formatting, but
| converting isn't a big pain. Being able to toss something
| together to display a portion of a curl call in a few minutes is
| great. I used to hate the top bar concept years ago when I was a
| windows user, but after switching to Unix for the past handful of
| years, I couldn't go back.
| xtracto wrote:
| A couple of weeks ago I looked for a Bitbar alternative for
| Linux Mint/Cinnamon and there is really nothing. There's some
| implementation of the "Argos" app but it doesn't really work.
| sdfhbdf wrote:
| Note that this is a rewrite/reboot from the original BitBar that
| is still marked as beta but has very frequent releases.
|
| There are more details about the motivations and such by the
| author in the announcement issue:
| https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/607
| aequitas wrote:
| One issue I've run into with BitBar is that you would need to
| install dependencies systemwide which I don't want to. A solution
| I found was to create a virtualenv for a specific script (or
| BitBar as a whole) and just put the path of the Python executable
| in the hashbang of the BitBar script, ie:
| #!/path/to/the/virtualenv/bin/python
|
| There is no need to 'activate' the virtualenv or use some kind of
| wrapper (unless your script depends on PATH for subcommands to be
| executed from the virtualenv as well).
| thamer wrote:
| I love BitBar and currently have 6 separate tools in my menu bar
| to keep track of things like Kubernetes instances in various QA
| environments, local services running on my machine (with stats +
| start/stop buttons + recent logs), or jobs running on cloud
| platforms.
|
| It's a fantastic tool and I'd encourage anyone who is thinking
| about building a tiny menubar app in just a few lines of code to
| look into it.
| xtracto wrote:
| Agree, I have it monitoring my AWS consumption cost and ETH
| prices. Pretty handy.
| mellavora wrote:
| Would you mind sharing a code example of how you do this? It
| sounds very helpful
| geoelectric wrote:
| I personally use it just to display the currently playing track
| on Music--which actually solved a huge gap.
|
| It was amazing to me that I couldn't find anything else to do
| just a basic "track playing" I could always see, without an
| always-on-top window blocking real estate. It seemed so obvious
| but nobody was offering that without adding a ton of other crap
| on top or making an intrusive windowed UI.
|
| Then this little script executor with a per-menu output schema
| worked great. I was able to customize a basic "current track"
| script that either came with or was around as a plugin/sample
| and get it working to my exact spec within an hour.
|
| What was especially awesome was when I moved to Catalina and
| the AppleScript targets changed from iTunes to Apple Music and
| broke automation, I was able to fix it in 30s by editing the
| script file for the new target name and it just worked. It was
| great to not have to wait on anyone else.
|
| I'll definitely be trying the reboot.
| imdsm wrote:
| This is quite weird. Saw BitBar on here about five years ago and
| started using it. Then today, having upgraded to Big Sur
| recently, I noticed it didn't look right. The update didn't work
| either, so I went to find the repo and saw it was now called
| XBar. I upgraded and moved my scripts across and forgot about it.
|
| Now what do I see when I come to HN for a quick break?
|
| XBar. More proof that life is just a simulation.
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(page generated 2021-03-19 23:01 UTC)