Status Information and Management for i3

simi3 is a configurable script that supplies content to i3bar.
The displayed content is interactive and can be controlled via both mouse and keyboard input.
Current project state: Alpha. Can not be used productively yet.

It works by having different modes, one of which is displayed at a time.
Each mode has multiple sections.
Each section has a generator and an action.
A generator is a function that defines the content of the function.

First, integrate the example-i3-config file into your i3 configuration.
That will make sure that your bar displays the status, and also configures everything to allow keyboard input.
You will notice that the settings echo a bunch of words into a file. That file is a named pipe, created with mkfifo(1), and is read by simi3.

At the beginning of simi3.js, there are a few constants that can be changed. Their defaults attempt to read and write files in /home/(username)/, so you will probably want to change them aswell.

Once everything is configured, restart i3 to try out the bar.
You may notice that some fields in the bar only display "...". That happens when the dependencies of the generator are not installed. Either install them (you can find out which they are by looking at the source code in default-generators.js), or use different generators instead.

The configuration of the bar contents is saved in config.js.
The configuration object, which is assigned to module.exports in the config script, has the following features:

• default_mode: name of the mode that should be displayed when simi3 starts
• modes: objects that contains all the modes

A mode object has a contents property, which has an array as it's value. The array contains a series of objects, which each define a section of the bar, from left to right, like so:

• generator: An AsyncFunction that provides the content of the bar section. If the generator has not managed to provide any content yet, ... is displayed in the bar.
• schedule: an integer that determines how often the content of the section is updated. number is multiplied by 500ms. -1 means that the generator should only be called once.
• type: changes the type of entry in the list. The default value makes the entry simply display text. "spinner" makes it display two arrows to allow rotating through several values.
• activatable: boolean that defines if the section should be able to be clicked or activated with the keyboard. (needs to be true for type: "spinner").
• activateAction: if activatable is true, one of several pre-defined actions, or an array containing multiple of them. Parameters can be supplied to the actions by providing additional properties in the section definition.
• scrollAction: only available when type = "spinner". Same as activateAction, but executes the action(s) when the value of the spinner is changed.

• modeswitch changes the current mode to the one which is specified in the modeswitchGoal property of the section.
• modeback goes back to the previously active mode.
• exec executes the value of the execCommand property of the section as a system command.
• leavebarmode switches the current i3 mode to default.
• modeswitchtospinnervalue changes the current mode to the one which is specified in the value property of the selected spinner value. Requires type: "spinner" on the section.
• execspinnervalue executes the value of the value property of the selected spinner value as a system command. Requires type: "spinner" on the section.
• refreshthis immediately re-runs the generator for the element which caused the action.
• refreshall immediately re-runs the generators of all elements in the current mode.

Generators are AsyncFunctions that are regularly called and provide the content of a section of the bar.
Generators can be defined in default_generators.js, but it is recommended that a separate file is created for custom generators, to keep files relatively short which makes it easier to find things. If a generator is defined in a custom file, it needs to be added to simi3.js, at the location where the generator scripts are loaded into global.generators, and to config.js, where they are extracted again.

A generator function can obtain some information from the environment, or do basically anything it wants, but it should not block execution, unless it wants to intentionally freeze the bar. Finally, the generator must return either an array of text component objects that will be displayed next to each other in the bar for a normal component or an array of spinner values that can be scrolled through for a spinner.

The text components work as follows:
Each text component must have a text attribute, which contains the text that should be displayed on the bar. Additional formatting can be done with attributes that match those of the Pango Markup language, except that underscores followed by a lowercase letter are replaced by the uppercase variant of the letter, so for example font_weight becomes fontWeight.

The spinner value is an object with the following properties:

• value: A string which represents this value of the spinner. Mainly used by the modeswitchtospinnervalue and execspinnervalue actions.
• defaultSelection: If true, makes the item the default selection of the spinner when it is first loaded. If specified on multiple values, the last one will be chosen. If not specified on any value, the first one will be chosen.
• display: An array of text components which are displayed next to each other in the bar when the value is selected.