This is my fork of the excellent mblocks software, by Mehdi Z., who managed to flawlessly implement the suckless philosophy in a Rust program. The code is self-documenting and can be extended and hacked on, even without extensive knowledge of Rust, because of the ease of use and intuitive nature of the code.

My changes merely involve what information is displayed in the statusbar, not how it functions.

Original README continues below:

This program is a multi-threaded memory-safe status monitor written in Rust. It updates the status only when there is a change.

First, clone this repository.

git clone https://gitlab.com/mhdy/mblocks.git

Then, configure the status blocks by editing src/config.rs.

Next, build a release binary.

cargo build --release

If the build succeeds, the binary can be found in target/release/mblocks.

Finally, move the executable to one directory of your PATH directories, and add mblocks & to your ~/.xinitrc.

The status monitor can be configured directly in the source src/config.rs. Examples of src/config.rs can be found here and here.

Status blocks are defined in the BLOCKS vector. Each block has a kind, executes a command, and has a prefix and a suffix for formatting.

There are 4 kinds of blocks:

• Once: blocks labeled with this kind are executed once at the start of the program.
• Periodic(N): blocks of this type are executed every N seconds.
• Signal(S): these blocks are executed when the signal S is sent to the mblocks process. To send a signal, you can use kill -$((34 + S)) $(pidof mblocks) where S is the argument given to Signal, and it should not exceed 15 (1 <= S <= 15). This means that you can define at most 15 Signal blocks, which is large enough.
• PeriodicOrSignal(N, S): the update of the block is made every N seconds or at the reception of the signal S.

The command attribute corresponds to the command to be executed and can be one of the following:

• Shell(COMMAND): this executes the shell command given as arguments (e.g. Shell(&["date", "+%a, %b %d %Y"])). Note the & preceding the array of arguments!
• Function(F): this executes the Rust function F given as argument. These latter can be placed in the directory src/blocks/. Check out the example functions.

The configuration file also defines the variable SEPARATOR that specifies the delimiter between blocks, and which could be any string. The generated status starts with the value of the variable PREFIX and ends with the value of the variable SUFFIX.

• If an empty string "" is returned by a block execution, then the corresponding block will not be displayed.
• If the exit status of a Shell command is non-zero, then failed will be shown in the status (in the corresponding block).
• If a Function command returns None, then failed will be shown in the status (in the corresponding block).
• mblocks is memory-safe; it is validated with valgrind. The memory leaks shown by valgrind are false positives related to the signal-hook crate.

MIT.