NAME

rainbarf - CPU/RAM/battery stats chart bar for tmux (and GNU screen)

VERSION

version 1.4

SYNOPSIS

rainbarf --tmux --width 40 --no-battery

DESCRIPTION

Fancy resource usage charts to put into the tmux status line. The CPU utilization history chart is tinted with the following colors to reflect the system memory allocation:

• green: free memory;
• yellow: active memory;
• blue: inactive memory;
• red: wired memory on Mac OS X / FreeBSD; "unaccounted" memory on Linux;
• cyan: cached memory on Linux, buf on FreeBSD.
• magenta: used swap memory.

If available, battery charge is displayed on the right.

SCREENSHOTS

iTerm2 with tmux-powerline, Solarized theme and Terminus font

rainbarf --battery --remaining --rgb

OSX Terminal with Tomorrow Night theme and Menlo font

rainbarf --battery --remaining --no-bright

Ubuntu Terminal with default theme and Monospace font

rainbarf --battery --bolt --bright

BONUS: an animated zsh prompt!

Proof of concept, use at your own risk!

USAGE

Installation

• Traditional way:

    perl Build.PL
    ./Build test
    ./Build install
  

• Homebrew way:

    brew install rainbarf
  

• MacPorts way:

    port install rainbarf
  

• CPAN way:

    cpan -i App::rainbarf
  

• Modern Perl way:

    cpanm git://github.com/creaktive/rainbarf.git
  

Configuration

Add the following line to your ~/.tmux.conf file:

set-option -g status-utf8 on
set -g status-right '#(rainbarf)'

Or, under GNOME Terminal:

set-option -g status-utf8 on
set -g status-right '#(rainbarf --rgb)'

Reload the tmux config by running tmux source-file ~/.tmux.conf.

CONFIGURATION FILE

~/.rainbarf.conf can be used to persistently store "OPTIONS":

# example configuration file
width=20   # widget width
bolt       # fancy charging character
remaining  # display remaining battery
rgb        # 256-colored palette

"OPTIONS" specified via command line override that values. Configuration file can be specified via RAINBARF environment variable:

RAINBARF=~/.rainbarf.conf rainbarf

OPTIONS

• --help

  This.

• --[no]battery

  Display the battery charge indicator. Enabled by default.

• --[no]remaining

  Display the time remaining until the battery is fully charged/empty. See "CAVEAT". Disabled by default.

• --[no]bolt

  Display even fancier battery indicator ⚡. Disabled by default.

• --[no]bright

  Tricky one. Disabled by default. See "CAVEAT".

• --[no]rgb

  Use the RGB palette instead of the system colors. Also disabled by default, for the same reasons as above.

• --fg COLOR_NAME

  Force chart foreground color.

• --bg COLOR_NAME

  Force chart background color.

• --[no]loadavg

  Use load average metric instead of CPU utilization. You might want to set the --max threshold since this is an absolute value and has varying ranges on different systems. Disabled by default.

• --[no]swap

  Display the swap usage. Used swap amount is added to the total amount, but the free swap amount is not! Disabled by default.

• --max NUMBER

  Maximum loadavg you expect before rescaling the chart. Default is 1.

• --order INDEXES

  Specify the memory usage bar order. The default is fwaic (free, wired, active, inactive & cached).

• --[no]tmux

  Force tmux colors mode. By default, rainbarf detects automatically if it is being called from tmux or from the interactive shell.

• --screen

  screen(1) colors mode. Experimental. See "CAVEAT".

• --width NUMBER

  Chart width. Default is 38, so both the chart and the battery indicator fit the tmux status line. Higher values may require disabling the battery indicator or raising the status-right-length value in ~/.tmux.conf.

• --datfile FILENAME

  Specify the file to log CPU stats to. Default: $HOME/.rainbarf.dat

• --skip NUMBER

  Do not write CPU stats if file already exists and is newer than this many seconds. Useful if you refresh tmux status quite frequently.

CAVEAT

Time remaining

If the --remaining option is present but you do not see the time in your status bar, you may need to increase the value of status-right-length to 48.

Color scheme

If you only see the memory usage bars but no CPU utilization chart, that's because your terminal's color scheme need an explicit distinction between foreground and background colors. For instance, "red on red background" will be displayed as a red block on such terminals. Thus, you may need the ANSI bright attribute for greater contrast, or maybe consider switching to the 256-color palette. There are some issues with that, though:

1. Other color schemes (notably, solarized) have different meaning for the ANSI bright attribute. So using it will result in a quite psychedelic appearance. 256-color pallette, activated by the --rgb flag, is unaffected by that.
2. The older versions of Term::ANSIColor dependency do not recognize bright/RGB settings, falling back to the default behavior (plain 16 colors). However, the whole Term::ANSIColor is optional, it is only required to preview the effects of the "OPTIONS" via command line before actually editing the ~/.tmux.conf. That is, rainbarf --bright --tmux is guaranteed to work despite the outdated Term::ANSIColor!

Another option is skipping the system colors altogether and use the RGB palette (rainbarf --rgb). This fixes the issue 1, but doesn't affect the issue 2. It still looks better, though.

Persistent storage

CPU utilization stats are persistently stored in the ~/.rainbarf.dat file. Every rainbarf execution will update and rotate that file. Since tmux calls rainbarf periodically (every 15 seconds, by default), the chart will display CPU utilization for the last ~9.5 minutes (15 * 38). Thus, several tmux instances running simultaneously for the same user will result in a faster chart scrolling.

screen

Stable screen version unfortunately has a broken UTF-8 handling specifically for the status bar. Thus, I have only tested the rainbarf with the variant from git://git.savannah.gnu.org/screen.git. My ~/.screenrc contents:

backtick 1 15 15 rainbarf --bright --screen
hardstatus string "%1`"
hardstatus lastline

REFERENCES

• top(1) is used to get the CPU/RAM stats if no /proc filesystem is available.
• ioreg(8) is used to get the battery status on Mac OS X.
• ACPI is used to get the battery status on Linux.
• Battery was a source of inspiration.
• Spark was another source of inspiration.

AUTHOR

Stanislaw Pusep stas@sysd.org

CONTRIBUTORS

• Chris Knadler
• cinaeco
• Clemens Hammacher
• H.Merijn Brand
• Henrik Hodne
• Joe Hassick
• Josh Matthews
• Lars Engels
• Sergey Romanov
• Tom Cammann
• Tuomas Jormola

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2016 by Stanislaw Pusep stas@sysd.org.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.