First of all, what a great App! I love the feature to split the output with --- to generate menu items. But it would be awesome if these could be made 'clickable' by providing an URL on a per Item basis.

e.g.

#!/bin/bash
echo "menu bar item"
echo "---"
echo "clickable menu item | href=http://something.com/"
echo "not clickable menu item"

What do you think?!

Spaces are not escaped. When i do "Run in terminal..." i get this error:

~/BitBar Plugins/test.5s.sh
zsh: no such file or directory: ~/BitBar

In the plugin section of the readme.md it says 'To write a plugin, just write some form of executable script that outputs to the standard output' but it doesn't seem to work for python or ruby with me.

Also the 'memusage.5s.py' plugin under Systems doesn't work for me.

Anyone else having trouble with this?

Hello,

Just started using BitBar.
I forked the repo to try and add a few functionalities (no whitespace trimming and a manual refresh button), but was having trouble building the project.

Looking at the .gitmodules file, it seems that the submodule are expected to be in the Vendor/ subdirectory. However, they are actually located in the Vendor/App/ subdirectory.

Modifying the .gitmodules file to set the correct path allows to correctly git submodules init and git submodules update. I've created a pull request that fixes the issue if it is confirmed.

Thank you,
Jean

As plugins grow, we will consider a better solution for plugin management that:

• bundle supporting files with a plugin
• makes plugins more visual (images)
• makes them searchable
• makes it easy to activate/deactivate them
• maybe has its own UI
• puts plugins in their own repo

Considerations

• would using an existing platform (like brew) solve this?

It would be great if there was a way to tell BitBar that nothing has changed since the last refresh and the last output/state should be kept.

One could solve this with caching in the plugin itself, but that's more complicated than simply returning something like | stale=true.

As BitBar's popularity will increase, it will be handy to make the plugins a separate repo, similar to oh-my-zsh. This will ensure that the commit tree won't be cluttered with plugin additions/edits and will allow community moderators to approve/reject plugins without giving access to the full BitBar project scope.

In addition it will allow users to retrieve plugin updates without checking out the entire codebase or configuring a sparse checkout.

Hi Mat,

first of all: Great Application.

I wanted to build out of current master because the release included in your repository is quite old and probably not containing the last bugfixes. XCode Version 7.2 (7C68) complains about not finding STPrivilegedTask.m. I already tried git submodule update --remote --merge.

Thanks for any advice.
Marco

If I am not mistaken, currently, the text in the menu bar is repeated as the first in the dropdown too. It would be great if we can turn this on or off as needed. Thoughts?

Tried a small example for multi line in bit bar:

#!/bin/bash
echo "1" 
echo "2" 
echo "3" 
echo "---" 
echo "menu"

The numbers cycle however on each loop when it reaches 3 the menu item is duplicated. Now that I have removed the script from the plugins folder it removed a single item but three remain. Not sure what has caused this. I am running OSX 10.11.1

Currently you have to go inside the plugin folder, rather than just selecting it.

It'd be nice to report it in red and with negative number. Right now it shows 0ms in white.

It would be great if Bitbar could be added to Homebrew!

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/blob/master/share/doc/homebrew/Formula-Cookbook.md

The plugin discovery strategy is pretty simple today : "Execute everything that's in the plugin folder". As much as I love the straightforwardness of this, I feel that this has some drawbacks

• First launch experience is not very clear (select which folder ?)
• Installing, removing and updating plugins is difficult (copy or symlink to the plugin folder)
• Having helper scripts right by your plugins is impossible (they should be put in a different folder)

One of the proposed solution in the discussion of PR #53 would be to symlink installed scripts to the plugin folder, but this adds another layer to installing / removing plugins.

Drawing from this, Bitbar could managed installed plugins by itself. For example :

• By defaults, Bitbar looks for plugins in an ApplicationData/Bitbar/Plugins folder. This folder can be changed.
• Drag and dropping a script on the Bitbar status menu item symlinks this file to the plugin folder (thus "installing" it in Bitbar)
• Additional options (Remove plugin, Set refresh time, ...) should be added to the plugin dropdown. Those options either remove or modify the name of the symlinked executable file (thus keeping the legacy API)

This might be a bit overkill, but I'd be willing to give it a try and implement it.
I believe this might make it easier to distribute Bitbar as well as plugins and improve the user experience by just having user drag and drop plugins instead of having to manage the plugin folder.

Currently, if I want to make bitbar re-check my plugin folder, I have to click Change Plugin Folder... and select the folder currently in use. It would be nice if there were a button to simply re-check the currently active plugin folder.

I wrote a bash code like this, and it runs with too much resource. CPU 10%~20%, memory(1.08G/8G). I don't think it should use so much resource.

172-10-23-204:msg hurray$ cat msg.5d.sh

!/bin/bash

echo "Hello | color=#FF0000"
echo "Hello | color=#FF7F00"
echo "Hello | color=#FFFF00"
echo "Hello | color=#00FF00"
echo "Hello | color=#00FFFF"
echo "Hello | color=#0000FF"
echo "Hello | color=#8B00FF"
echo "Hello | color=#FF00FF"

It should be white on black

Read config from something like ~/.bitbarrc. This should also enable plugins to hook into it.

For example, for the jenkins plugin, within ~/.bitbarrc:

[jenkins]
user="user"
password="password"

If not for this approach, some config management will be of use.

Scripts are currently run using a different $PATH, and so all terminal commands are not available to me unless I use export PATH='/my/paths:/my/additional/paths'

I'm using node to produce my script outputs, and node was not available to me until I changed the path or specified the node executables full path.

The tests reference an absolute path that seems to be on @matryer machine
~/Work/bitbar/BitBar/BitBarTests/TestPlugins

Furthermore, the .pch file that was removed in 0964f06 is still referenced by the tests

Asking so it can be included in the cask.

Not really sure what happens. I was trying to create a plugin that uses contrib-rocket. The plugin is the following:

#!/bin/bash
contrib-rocket -d 14

After clicking 'Reset' (or now every time I open the app), it disappears together with other menu bar icons. Can you check what's happening? Thanks.

Is it possible to stream stuff instead of rerunning a script every few seconds?

I have an implementation but all I see is 'BitBar ...'

Great project btw! I've been trying to write something like this for ages but always got stuck.

This might be a Yosemite problem.

I made a test script with only one line:

!/bin/sh

echo "FAIL | color=red"

And that is exactly what gets displayed in the menu bar: FAIL | color=red

Follow-up: I tried with BitBar 1.0 and 1.1 on both Mavericks 10.9.4 and Yosemite 10.10.1 and no joy.

Also, the link on the homepage for the "latest" version of BitBar is for 1.0 not 1.1.

Example:
something | color=#ff0000 size=10 font=Tahoma
something | color=#ff0000 size=10
something | color=#ff0000 font=Tahoma

Color is set correctly, but size and font attributes do nothing.
I've read that something changed in method fontWithName:size: in Yosemite or it got deprecated. Maybe that's the case.

Would be got to know what features came in a release.

I've tried escaping but it seems like the app doesn't support parsing escaped spaces when splitting the string.

echo "test me | bash=/some/pa\ th/with/a\ space\ or\ two param1=foo"

It is wonderful to have so many amazing plugins! As the project grows, it will take time to examine the source of each one to determine how it functions and whether it is worth trying. It would help discoverability to have a github.io page with a screenshot or two for each plugin, demonstrating the functionality. Having a central page like this (with links to the raw plugin files, of course) would make it easy to find great new plugins. The screenshots can probably be taken from pull requests that include them.

Is it possible to get the name limited on this to the first say, 15 characters of the song then the artist name?

Otherwise stuff like this happens.

When I use the "Change Plugin Folder" menu item, it allows me to choose a new folder via the Finder. After I do this I get a message that no plugins are found. (There is, however, one plugin in the folder I'm choosing). When I then choose "Open Plugin Folder" the Finder opens to my "Documents" folder, rather than the folder I'd previously chosen for my plugins.

This is v1.2 installed via homebrew. OS is 10.11.2

Hi,

As seen in the screenshot below, the text isn't vertically aligned correctly in the menu bar.

Cheers,
Tom :)

PATH for the app is limited. Most commands that I want to run, like docker, are not in PATH for the app. This makes it very limited regarding what I can write in the plugins.

Would like to know what people are doing for this. I would also like to make a recommendation that PATH from login shell is somehow incorporated, as the premise is running custom scripts that work in our terminals.

Ability to set an icon for the menu bar item would be really great. Most of the menu bar items work this way, and having text feels out-of-place.

I would like to create submenus, so that we know that these menus go under a parent menu. Is this possible already? Simple way would be to have some indentation. Suggestions please?

Let's just make brew install bitbar work?

• see https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/blob/master/share/doc/homebrew/Formula-Cookbook.md

As you can see below, the text for the spotify plugin is not exactly vertically aligned with the OS X clock (and left-aligned menu bar items either). Not sure if this is exclusive to Spotify plugin or all text rendered via bitbar.

I have a BitBar script named netstat.1m.sh. It checks the status of the internet connection and displays either Up or Down in the menu bar. It also logs each run of the script.

I expect the status to be updated every 1m. But after a while, BitBar updates twice per minute - once at the 40 second mark and then again at the 20 second mark.

@mralexgray - after merging your changes, my BitBar build is broken. Probably something trivial, so I thought I'd ask before digging too deeply into it.

I would love to drag a folder into bitbar and have it open in a text editor.

I would also love to drag a link into bitbar to save or post it to a social/cloud service.

MBP, El Capitan, v. 1.3.1

When I wake computer from sleep multiple instances are shown in menubar.

When using a color for the menu bar item itself, it looks bad when the dropdown is open, since most colors don't go well with the blue selection color.

Example:

Without dropdown:

With dropdown opened:

We should consider to switch the color of selected menu bar items to white.

What's your opinion on providing an auto-updater (such as (sparkle)[http://sparkle-project.org]) to keep both the plugins and applications up to date ?

The Bitbar app does not seem to be saving the plugin folder and no plugins are subsequently found.

Search for plugins in the selected plugin folder recursively.

This will allow organisation of plugins like the Plugins folder in this repository.

I'm relying on monospaced digits (meaning that all digits have the same width) in my custom stocks plugin. This is typical a font feature.

1.3.1 and 1.4beta use exactly the same font on OS X 10.11.1 El Capitan (the San Francisco system font), but while 1.3.1 uses monospaced digits, 1.4beta doesn't anymore. See screenshots:

1.3.1:

1.4beta:

I think monospaced digits are always preferable for BitBar use cases.

This may help to resolve it:

• Thread in Apple Developer Forums
• Threat at StackOverflow

Can't send you socks without an available address!