[infofeld] needs (another) major rewrite. My entire status bar does. This was triggered by a post from [phillbush on nixers.net][p]. [infofeld]: https://uninformativ.de/git/infofeld2/ [p]: https://nixers.net/Thread-Unix-screen-shots-thread?pid=21397#pid21397 Originally, I just used lemonbar with katriawm. Lemonbar was rather simple, much like dwm's status bar once was: You just pipe text into it. while sleep 1; do date; done | lemonbar That's nice if all you want to display is text. I copied this model when I wrote [bevelbar] -- because lemonbar just didn't provide the correct look when used together with katriawm. [bevelbar]: https://uninformativ.de/git/bevelbar/ A few months later I thought: It would be really nice to have little info graphics, like CPU load or network traffic. I used to display that as plain text, but that's just not great. So, I added that function to bevelbar. But how? Do you pipe an image to bevelbar? No, you write the path of an image file and bevelbar will display it. This works and it's reasonably fast since the images are so tiny, but it's just not a great design. So many roundtrips. Also: How does the widget know the available size? Bevelbar decides that, but it can't tell the widget about it, so you have to set it manually in advance. Once set up, this works, but meh. Wouldn't it be nicer if the widget could draw to X11 directly? So, as originally brought up by phillbush, WindowMaker's dockapps come to mind. The entire status bar (including simple text areas) could be made up by such dockapps. The question is: Do I want to implement that? Dockapps have a little bit of overhead and they usually run at a fixed size of 64x64. Do I want do spend more time on X11 in the first place? Should I finally migrate to Wayland? Maybe I'll choose the easy way out, once more: Implement a status bar system where widget draw to their own windows, but do it in the simplest way possible. So I won't waste much time on it.