ranjithsiji/i3blocks-config

The funky i3blocks configuration.

i3blocks-config

This is my default i3blocks configuration.

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Standard installation:

   1. Install i3blocks:

Start of by installing i3blocks. Ideally istallation should be performed with your package manager.

   2. Install an emojicon font:

Recommended font: noto-fonts-emoji. All you need to do is install the font, i3 should recognice it and use it automatically.

   3. Copy the i3blocks configuration:

From the repository root, invoke ./install.sh. This script will copy the configuration to your home directory. Caution: if you already have a i3blocks configuration setup in ~/.config/i3blocks you might want to back it up first. Also note that i3blocks is not the same software as i3status/i3bar and such will not modify them. If you haven't used i3blocks before you can proceed without worrying.

   4. Modify i3 configuration file:

~/.config/i3/config:

bar {
  position top                  # Position should be 'bottom' or 'top'.
  status_command i3blocks       # Invoke i3blocks.

  # Possible other bar configurations go here...
  # ...
}

You could also modify the font and font size in this file. The default font pango will do just fine but you might want to increese the font size based on your needs and also switch to monospace (pango:monospace).

# Font for window titles. Will also be used by the bar unless a different font
# is used in the bar {} block below.
font pango:monospace 12

Another good monospace bold font, ttf-hack:

font pango:Hack Bold 16

   5. Make audio changes signal the bar:

The sound level indicator is updated once every tenth second. If you want a more responsive sound level indicator you can use pkill -RTMIN+1 i3blocks to send a signal on sound level changes. This will update the sound level blocklet instantly. Here is an example of how this could be accomplished.

~/.config/i3/config:

# User-added function keys:
bindsym XF86AudioMute         exec --no-startup-id pamixer -t     && pkill -RTMIN+1 i3blocks
bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume  exec --no-startup-id pamixer -d 3   && pkill -RTMIN+1 i3blocks
bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume  exec --no-startup-id pamixer -i 3   && pkill -RTMIN+1 i3blocks

Modification:

It is easy to modify the bar. Take a look at .config/i3blocks/config and see for yourself how easy it is to modify any of the blocklets. If any blocklet is malfunctioning, this should be the entypoint for bug searching.

If you want to modify the weather location data, take a look into config/i3blocks/weather/weather.py (line 9). This too is easy to modify, just change the YR.no XML weblink. To get desired XML weblink, go to the YR webpage and find a location. Add /forecast.xml to the end of the URL (english YR version only) to get the appropriate weblink for the weather script.

Thumbnail:

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Requiered software packages.

Software	Arch Linux Package	Gentoo Package
i3blocks	community/i3blocks	x11-misc/i3blocks
Noto Color Emoji	extra/noto-fonts-emoji	media-fonts/noto-emoji
ACPI	community/acpi	sys-power/acpid
Sysstat	community/sysstat	app-admin/sysstat
Python 3	extra/python	>=dev-lang/python-3.6
Python Requests	extra/python-requests	dev-python/requests
lm_sensors	extra/lm_sensors	sys-apps/lm-sensors

Note: Gentoo users need to emerge media-libs/freetype with USE=png for Noto Color Emoji to render.