Vicious

Vicious is a modular widget library for window managers, but mostly catering to users of the awesome window manager. It was derived from the old Wicked widget library, and has some of the old Wicked widget types, a few of them rewritten, and a good number of new ones.

Vicious widget types are a framework for creating your own widgets. Vicious contains modules that gather data about your system, and a few awesome helper functions that make it easier to register timers, suspend widgets and so on. Vicious doesn't depend on any third party Lua libraries, but may depend on additional system utilities (see widget description).

Usage examples

Start with a simple widget, like date. Then build your setup from there, one widget at a time. Also remember that besides creating and registering widgets you have to add them to a wibox (statusbar) in order to actually display them.

Date widget

Update every 2 seconds (the default interval), use standard date sequences as the format string:

datewidget = wibox.widget.textbox()
vicious.register(datewidget, vicious.widgets.date, "%b %d, %R")

Memory widget

Update every 13 seconds, append MiB to 2nd and 3rd returned values and enables caching.

memwidget = wibox.widget.textbox()
vicious.cache(vicious.widgets.mem)
vicious.register(memwidget, vicious.widgets.mem, "$1 ($2MiB/$3MiB)", 13)

HDD temperature widget

Update every 19 seconds, request the temperature level of the /dev/sda and append °C to the returned value. Since the listening port is not provided, default one is used.

hddtempwidget = wibox.widget.textbox()
vicious.register(hddtempwidget, vicious.widgets.hddtemp, "${/dev/sda} °C", 19)

Mbox widget

Updated every 5 seconds, provide full path to the mbox as argument:

mboxwidget = wibox.widget.textbox()
vicious.register(mboxwidget, vicious.widgets.mbox, "$1", 5,
                 "/home/user/mail/Inbox")

Battery widget

Update every 61 seconds, request the current battery charge level and displays a progressbar, provides "BAT0" as battery ID:

batwidget = wibox.widget.progressbar()

-- Create wibox with batwidget
batbox = wibox.layout.margin(
    wibox.widget{{max_value = 1, widget = batwidget,
                  border_width = 0.5, border_color = "#000000",
                  color = {type = "linear",
                           from = {0, 0},
                           to = {0, 30},
                           stops = {{0, "#AECF96"}, {1, "#FF5656"}}}},
                 forced_height = 10, forced_width = 8,
                 direction = 'east', color = beautiful.fg_widget,
                 layout = wibox.container.rotate},
    1, 1, 3, 3)

-- Register battery widget
vicious.register(batwidget, vicious.widgets.bat, "$2", 61, "BAT0")

CPU usage widget

Update every 3 seconds, feed the graph with total usage percentage of all CPUs/cores:

cpuwidget = awful.widget.graph()
cpuwidget:set_width(50)
cpuwidget:set_background_color"#494B4F"
cpuwidget:set_color{type = "linear", from = {0, 0}, to = {50, 0},
                    stops = {{0, "#FF5656"}, {0.5, "#88A175"}, {1, "#AECF96"}}}
vicious.register(cpuwidget, vicious.widgets.cpu, "$1", 3)

Format functions

You can use a function instead of a string as the format parameter. Then you are able to check the value returned by the widget type and change it or perform some action. You can change the color of the battery widget when it goes below a certain point, hide widgets when they return a certain value or maybe use string.format for padding.

Do not confuse this with just coloring the widget, in those cases standard Pango markup can be inserted into the format string.

The format function will get the widget as its first argument, table with the values otherwise inserted into the format string as its second argument, and will return the text/data to be used for the widget.

Examples

Hide mpd widget when no song is playing

mpdwidget = wibox.widget.textbox()
vicious.register(
    mpdwidget,
    vicious.widgets.mpd,
    function (widget, args)
        if args["{state}"] == "Stop" then
            return ''
        else
            return ('<span color="white">MPD:</span> %s - %s'):format(
                args["{Artist}"], args["{Title}"])
        end
    end)

Use string.format for padding

uptimewidget = wibox.widget.textbox()
vicious.register(uptimewidget, vicious.widgets.uptime,
                 function (widget, args)
                     return ("Uptime: %02d %02d:%02d "):format(
                         args[1], args[2], args[3])
                 end, 61)

When it comes to padding it is also useful to mention how a widget can be configured to have a fixed width. You can set a fixed width on your textbox widgets by changing their width field (by default width is automatically adapted to text width). The following code forces a fixed width of 50 px to the uptime widget, and aligns its text to the right:

uptimewidget = wibox.widget.textbox()
uptimewidget.width, uptimewidget.align = 50, "right"
vicious.register(uptimewidget, vicious.widgets.uptime, "$1 $2:$3", 61)

Stacked graph

Stacked graphs are handled specially by Vicious: format functions passed to the corresponding widget types must return an array instead of a string.

cpugraph = wibox.widget.graph()
cpugraph:set_stack(true)
cpugraph:set_stack_colors({"red", "yellow", "green", "blue"})
vicious.register(cpugraph, vicious.widgets.cpu,
                 function (widget, args)
                     return {args[2], args[3], args[4], args[5]}
                 end, 3)

The snipet above enables graph stacking/multigraph and plots usage of all four CPU cores on a single graph.

Substitute widget types' symbols

If you are not happy with default symbols used in volume, battery, cpufreq and other widget types, use your own symbols without any need to modify modules. The following example uses a custom table map to modify symbols representing the mixer state: on or off/mute.

volumewidget = wibox.widget.textbox()
vicious.register(volumewidget, vicious.widgets.volume,
                 function (widget, args)
                     local label = {["♫"] = "O", ["♩"] = "M"}
                     return ("Volume: %d%% State: %s"):format(
                         args[1], label[args[2]])
                 end, 2, "PCM")

Get data from the widget

vicious.call could be useful for naughty notification and scripts:

mybattery = wibox.widget.textbox()
vicious.register(mybattery, vicious.widgets.bat, "$2%", 17, "0")
mybattery:buttons(awful.util.table.join(
    awful.button(
        {}, 1,
        function ()
            naughty.notify{title = "Battery indicator",
                           text = vicious.call(vicious.widgets.bat,
                                               "Remaining time: $3", "0")}
        end)))

Format functions can be used as well:

mybattery:buttons(awful.util.table.join(
    awful.button(
        {}, 1,
        function ()
            naughty.notify{
                title = "Battery indicator",
                text = vicious.call(
                    vicious.widgets.bat,
                    function (widget, args)
                        return ("%s: %10sh\n%s: %14d%%\n%s: %12dW"):format(
                            "Remaining time", args[3],
                            "Wear level", args[4],
                            "Present rate", args[5])
                    end, "0")}
        end)))

Contributing

For details, see CONTRIBUTING.md. Vicious is licensed under GNU GPLv2+, which require all code within the package to be released under a compatible license. All contributors retain their copyright to their code, so please make sure you add your name to the header of every file you touch.

Copying

Vicious is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Please refer to our documentation for the full list of authors.