Updated README.md

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Trey Blancher 2020-10-25 22:55:16 -04:00
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@ -4,34 +4,16 @@ root window (mostly I only see one window taking up the entire screen, with a
dmenu at the top, and another dmenu at the bottom that runs conky). I run conky
in CLI mode only, and that's good enough for me.
I pipe the output of conky through dmenu, which upates every two seconds. I
also have custom formatting functions (see scripts.lua in this repository).
This ensures the output of conky has the same length, even if certain fields
within the string change. This is especially useful for the network bandwidth
output, which otherwise change length every two seconds as the bandwidth usage
I pipe the output of conky through dmenu, which upates every second. I also
have custom formatting functions (see scripts.lua in this repository). This
ensures the output of conky has the same length, even if certain fields within
the string change. This is especially useful for the network bandwidth output,
which otherwise change length every two seconds as the bandwidth usage
fluctuates between bytes (B), Kilobytes (KiB), and Megabytes (MiB).
TODO: My formatting function needs to be generalized. Essentially, I'm
creating a conky-specific printf function. Right now, it's split into two
functions, with calls to the Lua string.format function. One function takes
only one format specifier, and the other takes two.
I have implemented `conky_printf`, a generalized function for printing conky
data to the output string. It needs more testing, as I'm sure there are edge
cases where it doesn't work properly.
The `fmt()` function takes the format string, and expects a single numerical
second argument. If the format string contains any format specifiers (see `man
sprintf` for details) that aren't numbers (e.g. `%s` for strings), fmt() will
fail with an error. I use this for the percentages of RAM, Swap, and CPU in
use.
The `fmt2()` function takes the format string, and expects two string arguments.
It is not necessarily an error if either or both of the arguments are numbers,
they will be cast to strings. I use this function to format the bandwidth
("Net:") display in conky, so the length of this segment doesn't shift around
(the Unicode arrow icons for up and down bandwidth stay in the same place).
Ideally these two functions would be combined into a `"conky_printf` function,
that could take an arbitrary format string with any number of format
specifiers, with the requisite number of numerical or string arguments. I know
how to do this with the `...`/`arg`/`unpack(arg)` table specification in Lua,
but numeric specifiers need to convert any strings passed to the function to
numeric values instead of strings. This is the challenging part, but should be
doable.
TODO: Add color to the conky output! That will take if statments, and text
for dmenu to consume.