Hello there! I’m still looking for an elegant window manager for developers under GNU/Linux. I think that mcwm is one of the nearest to my concept of design. No window borders, small RAM resources, XCB based.
When I downloaded mcwm project I noticed the TODO file containing an interesting feature request: snap borders. So in a couple of day I produced a patch and submitted to the author. Unfortunately the author’s git repository doesn’t have a web interface, so, if you’re curious, you can see the patch as follows:
$ git clone git://hack.org/mcwm $ cd mcwm $ git diff 864bc76d d20afb19
Well, now that the patch is merged, It’s time to develop a general purpose toolbar. A toolbar to display values, a toolbar to perform actions, a toolbar to rule them all! 🙂
And…in a couple of days I developed qbar that uses stdin streaming to fill itself with objects like: buttons, labels, menu, progress bar. And who knows about the future? You can write you “applet” in standard bash script and redirect the stdout to qbar through a pipe. As you can imagine there is a protocol for the arguments given in the stdin. The protocol is the following:
LABEL [L][<refresh>]<text> BUTTON [B][<refresh>][<icon_path>][<command>]<text> MENU [M][<icon_path>][<text>][<icon_path][<command>]<text>*[<icon_path>][<command>]<text>... SEPARATOR [S][<size_mode>]<size> PROGRESS BAR [P][<refresh>][<size>]<text> <refresh> can be S (static) or R (refresh) <size_mode> can be E (expanding) or F (fixed)
qbar is developed in Qt (4.8), so you can use a simple CSS stylesheet to develop a new theme. Let me show you how:
QMainWindow {
background: #333333;
color: #fff;
}
QLabel {
color: #fff;
}
QMenu {
background: #333333;
color: #fff;
}
QPushButton {
border-radius: 10px;
padding-left: 5px;
padding-right: 5px;
color: #fff;
}
QPushButton:hover, QMenu::item:selected{
background: #666;
}
#ITEM_2 {
width: 150px;
}
QProgressBar {
border: 2px solid rgba(0,0,0,0);
border-radius: 5px;
text-align: center;
background-color: #666;
color: #fff;
}
QProgressBar::chunk {
background-color: #05B8CC;
}
As you can see from the code, you can refer to the n-th element using the CSS selector <#ITEM_> followed by the element id. And, you can use the following command line parameters:
qbar [-a <l|c|r>] [-p <t|b>] [-t] [-h <pixels>] [-stylesheet <file>] -a alignment l = left c = center r = right -p position t = top b = bottom -t set transparent background -h height in pixels -stylesheet css file
qbar is published at Gitorious:
git://gitorious.org/qt-projects/qbar.git
and at Qt-apps.org. What’s missing? Ah…yes, screenshot!
If you liked it, please vote for it on qt-apps.org, and if you want please submit patches and feature requests, all the code is released under the terms of GNU/GPL.
Henomis' Blog 