Hi3status is a compact, lightweight, responsive and highly configurable status line for i3bar.

The hi3status package comes in three parts:

• hi3status the library contains all of the code necessary for running a status line, as well as some basic components (or blocks) that can be used to make up a status line.
• hi3status the program is responsible for actually running the status line.
• hi3status-ctl is a small program which can be used to trigger updates to the status line.

hi3status configuration

The hi3status configuration file is written in Haskell and is located at ~/.config/hi3status/hi3status.hs. A brief example of this file is given below:

import Hi3Status
import Hi3Status.Blocks.StaticText
import Hi3Status.Blocks.Clock

myBlocks = 
  [ "message" %% StaticTextBlock "Welcome to hi3status" Nothing
  , "time"    %% ClockBlock "%H:%M:%S %d/%m/%Y"
  ]

main = hi3status myBlocks

The main structural element of a hi3status status line are its blocks, which are defined to be values of types which are instances of the Block class. For example in the above, StaticTextBlock is a block that displays a piece of unchanging text with an optional given color, and ClockBlock is a block that displays a clock with the given formatting.

Each block provided to hi3status must have a unique name associated with it. To do this we form a BlocksEntry using the %% operator:

aBlockEntry = "aUniqueName" %% aBlock

Finally we combine these BlocksEntrys into a single value of the type Blocks, which is just a type synonym for [BlocksEntry]. We then wire up the main function of the configuration file to this value using hi3status:

main = hi3status myBlocks

i3bar configuration

In order to use hi3status as the status line for i3bar, make sure the following is present in your .i3/config:

bar {
    status_command hi3status
    ...
}

hi3status-ctl

The hi3status-ctl program is used to trigger updates to hi3status. For example, suppose we have a block which displays the current volume of the speakers. It would be desireable to have hi3status update this block when the volume changes. We would thus take the appropriate action such that the following is run every time the volume changes:

hi3status-ctl --name=volume

Note that the name specified above is the unique name given in the BlocksEntry for the appropriate block.