14 ms·

Xbar: The BitBar reboot. Put anything in your macOS menu bar

267 points by rjmunro 6y ago

aequitas 6y ago
One issue I've run into with BitBar is that you would need to install dependencies systemwide which I don't want to. A solution I found was to create a virtualenv for a specific script (or BitBar as a whole) and just put the path of the Python executable in the hashbang of the BitBar script, ie: #!/path/to/the/virtualenv/bin/python There is no need to 'activate' the virtualenv or use some kind of wrapper (unless your script depends on PATH for subcommands to be executed from the virtualenv as well).
psychometry 6y ago
I like that they have some to show the number of unread Slack notifications, but the scripts are necessarily kind of hacky in order to deal with rate-limiting. It's ridiculous that Slack doesn't have such a feature built-in because people have been asking for it for years.
- tyingq 6y ago
  Doesn't fix it, but supposedly there's an undocumented api endpoint here: https://api.slack.com/api/client.counts?token=token_here https://api.slack.com/api/client.counts?token=token_here It will return "has_unreads=true" for channels that have unread notifications. So perhaps better than a naive brute force traversal.
DandyDev 6y ago
How does it compare to Swiftbar[0]? Any reasons to use Xbar over SwiftBar given that the latter was built with a stack that is more "native" to Mac than Golang? [0] https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar
- eddyg 6y ago
  This was the first question that came to mind for me too.
- sdfhbdf 6y ago
  UPDATE: XBar is a reboot by the original creator of BitBar [2]. I understood it as I was confused why I have it in my starred. The below is my analysis before I understood it. UPDATE 2: The authors of both also were considering to merge the projects. [3] I see XBar seems to be more advanced and more popular. It has these Advanced APIs like URL schema [0]. and also the GUI for plugins compared to Swiftbar The tech stack of course is also much different as it's written in Go and Swiftbar as the name applies in Swift. Although I like that SwiftBar has cron syntax support [1]. I didn't find a similar function in XBar. A comprehensive comparison in one or the other's repo README could be useful [0]: https://github.com/matryer/xbar#advanced-apis https://github.com/matryer/xbar#advanced-apis [1]: https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar#refresh-schedule https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar#refresh-schedule [2]: https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/607 https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/607 [3]: https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/607#issuecomment-775205210 https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/607#issuecomment-7752...
- jonpurdy 6y ago
  I was wondering about why SwiftBar existed when there was already BitBar, and a lot is explained in this thread on Github: https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar/issues/95 https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar/issues/95 TL;DR: BitBar stopped working well in Big Sur and the old code base was increasingly hard to update and build.
bajsejohannes 6y ago
I can't find any reasons why it was rewritten. Was it C before? (I can't tell, because https://github.com/matryer/bitbar https://github.com/matryer/bitbar redirects to xbar)
- spurgu 6y ago
  Objective-C: https://web.archive.org/web/20210118051718/https://github.com/matryer/bitbar https://web.archive.org/web/20210118051718/https://github.co...
- ihuman 6y ago
  The old repo is archived in the new one https://github.com/matryer/xbar/tree/master/archive/bitbar https://github.com/matryer/xbar/tree/master/archive/bitbar
m12k 6y ago
I've been discovering more and more high quality open source apps for Mac recently. My other favorites so far: https://github.com/iterate-ch/cyberduck https://github.com/iterate-ch/cyberduck https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/sfsam/Itsycal https://github.com/sfsam/Itsycal https://github.com/newmarcel/KeepingYouAwake https://github.com/newmarcel/KeepingYouAwake
- raju 6y ago
  Along the same vein, this was posted a little while back on HN which lists a few other ones that I have found useful. https://onethingwell.org/ https://onethingwell.org/
- tylerritchie 6y ago
  KeepingYouAwake is nice (and I'm not about to pretend the following solution is good for everyone), however, I've found on the last couple of McBook fresh installs using caffeinate [1] from the terminal is sufficient. I usually have a terminal open anyway and `caffeinate -d -t 999999` usually does what I want (stay awake until I come back and tell you to go to sleep). Usually it's two keystrokes away (up arrow, enter), if not, that's quick enough to type for my purposes. That said, it's a bad approach if you want to suggest it as a tool for someone's workflow who _doesn't_ have a terminal open all of the time. [1] https://ss64.com/osx/caffeinate.html https://ss64.com/osx/caffeinate.html
  - KMnO4 6y ago
    You can omit the -t and it will run forever.
  - weaksauce 6y ago
    you can throw an alias in your .bashrc or .zshrc and have it even easier... alias caffeine="caffeinate -d -t 999999"
  - uncledave 6y ago
    I tend to use caffeinate to wrap scripts only. I want it to go to sleep and stop eating all my electricity when it’s done.
jjice 6y ago
Bitbar-esque tools are fantastic. There are a wide variety on Linux, watching with slightly different formatting, but converting isn't a big pain. Being able to toss something together to display a portion of a curl call in a few minutes is great. I used to hate the top bar concept years ago when I was a windows user, but after switching to Unix for the past handful of years, I couldn't go back.
- xtracto 6y ago
  A couple of weeks ago I looked for a Bitbar alternative for Linux Mint/Cinnamon and there is really nothing. There's some implementation of the "Argos" app but it doesn't really work.
wrink 6y ago
Site is down :c 503
sdfhbdf 6y ago
Note that this is a rewrite/reboot from the original BitBar that is still marked as beta but has very frequent releases. There are more details about the motivations and such by the author in the announcement issue: https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/607 https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/607
imdsm 6y ago
This is quite weird. Saw BitBar on here about five years ago and started using it. Then today, having upgraded to Big Sur recently, I noticed it didn't look right. The update didn't work either, so I went to find the repo and saw it was now called XBar. I upgraded and moved my scripts across and forgot about it. Now what do I see when I come to HN for a quick break? XBar. More proof that life is just a simulation.
joshstrange 6y ago
Just updated from BitBar and ran into a small issue since xbar doesn't support custom plugin folders the same way BitBar did (as in a way to change it via the GUI). Thankfully you can just symlink the plugin folder to your old BitBar folder and everything works as expected. I opened an issue for it here: https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/653 https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/653
aquir 6y ago
It would be awesome to find something similar to windows...I can imagine "boosting up" my taskbar with this kind of stuff. If anyone knows a similar app to Windows please let us know
- st0le 6y ago
  Rainmeter is the closest thing to it.
- matryer 6y ago
  In the future, xbar might be able to support Windows :)
thamer 6y ago
I love BitBar and currently have 6 separate tools in my menu bar to keep track of things like Kubernetes instances in various QA environments, local services running on my machine (with stats + start/stop buttons + recent logs), or jobs running on cloud platforms. It's a fantastic tool and I'd encourage anyone who is thinking about building a tiny menubar app in just a few lines of code to look into it.
- xtracto 6y ago
  Agree, I have it monitoring my AWS consumption cost and ETH prices. Pretty handy.
  - mellavora 6y ago
    Would you mind sharing a code example of how you do this? It sounds very helpful
    - kristofferR 6y ago
      Just download xbar, install some plugins through the included plugin browser, and check the source code. It's incredibly easy. If you can echo something in a shell script you can echo it in the menu bar.
    - xtracto 6y ago
      https://gist.github.com/obaqueiro/af4de922e9233e084057efcd668084d6 https://gist.github.com/obaqueiro/af4de922e9233e084057efcd66... https://gist.github.com/obaqueiro/4c8e679bb684f966a654f3aa999628e4 https://gist.github.com/obaqueiro/4c8e679bb684f966a654f3aa99... They are pretty handy
      - thamer 6y ago
        I'd suggest checking out jq for parsing JSON files: $ curl -s https://api.coinbase.com/v2/prices/ETH-USD/spot | jq -r .data.amount 1675.55
- 6y ago
sebastianmarkow 6y ago
http://www.hammerspoon.org/ http://www.hammerspoon.org/
- permalac 6y ago
  What do you use it for? How does it compare to keyboard maestro?
  - mikeywazowski 6y ago
    I'm not the person you're asking, and I do most of my work on a PC running Linux now, but Hammerspoon is one of a few things I really miss about OSX. I mostly used it to create small utility applications for the menu bar. Probably the most useful one was a Bitbucket pull request checker, which would monitor the status of open pull requests and display information about which PRs I hadn't yet viewed or approved, number of new comments since I last viewed the PR, build status etc. My job involves frequently reviewing PRs so this was really helpful for me. I've tried rewriting this app for polybar on Linux but it's much more difficult to maintain, and sadly too much effort for me to bother with right now. I haven't tried Keyboard Maestro - at a glance it looks really good, but doesn't appear to be open source like Hammerspoon. I can't tell whether it enables you to create stuff for the menu bar. I'm pretty sure Hammerspoon can do anything KM can, but I imagine KM is easier to use, particularly if you're not into programming.
xbar 6y ago
Sup.
- yurishimo 6y ago
  Sup.
bloopernova 6y ago
My BitBar script displays the Unix epoch, comma separated: { 1,616,198,970 } Script is 2 lines: EPOCH=$(/bin/date +%s | /usr/local/opt/gnu-sed/libexec/gnubin/sed ':a;s/\B[0-9]\{3\}\>/,&/;ta') echo "{" "${EPOCH}" "}"
seanwilson 6y ago
BitBar is really cool. You can get something up and running in no time and it's fun to come up with some small personal automations. On this topic, does anyone know simple way on Mac to display a multiline text input pop-up? I'm playing with making a BitBar app that lets you keep a timesheet of what you've done today that syncs with a cloud API. I want a system tray icon that when you click it, it pops up with your notes so far that you can then edit and save your changes. I know you can use osascript to create an ugly text input pop-up but it gets dismissed when you hit enter which I don't want. I'm looking for something lightweight to setup. Likely using Node but would rather not have to require Electron.
themk 6y ago
I've been using barbly[0] which I wrote to scratch my own itch. It uses a JSON format for describing the menu bars which I found easier to work with. It's aesthetic is slightly different as well. [0] https://github.com/luke-clifton/barbly https://github.com/luke-clifton/barbly

267 points by rjmunro 6y ago

One issue I've run into with BitBar is that you would need to install dependencies systemwide which I don't want to. A solution I found was to create a virtualenv for a specific script (or BitBar as a whole) and just put the path of the Python executable in the hashbang of the BitBar script, ie: #!/path/to/the/virtualenv/bin/python There is no need to 'activate' the virtualenv or use some kind of wrapper (unless your script depends on PATH for subcommands to be executed from the virtualenv as well).

psychometry 6y ago

I like that they have some to show the number of unread Slack notifications, but the scripts are necessarily kind of hacky in order to deal with rate-limiting. It's ridiculous that Slack doesn't have such a feature built-in because people have been asking for it for years.

tyingq 6y ago
Doesn't fix it, but supposedly there's an undocumented api endpoint here: https://api.slack.com/api/client.counts?token=token_here https://api.slack.com/api/client.counts?token=token_here It will return "has_unreads=true" for channels that have unread notifications. So perhaps better than a naive brute force traversal.

DandyDev 6y ago

How does it compare to Swiftbar[0]? Any reasons to use Xbar over SwiftBar given that the latter was built with a stack that is more "native" to Mac than Golang? [0] https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar

eddyg 6y ago
This was the first question that came to mind for me too.
sdfhbdf 6y ago
UPDATE: XBar is a reboot by the original creator of BitBar [2]. I understood it as I was confused why I have it in my starred. The below is my analysis before I understood it. UPDATE 2: The authors of both also were considering to merge the projects. [3] I see XBar seems to be more advanced and more popular. It has these Advanced APIs like URL schema [0]. and also the GUI for plugins compared to Swiftbar The tech stack of course is also much different as it's written in Go and Swiftbar as the name applies in Swift. Although I like that SwiftBar has cron syntax support [1]. I didn't find a similar function in XBar. A comprehensive comparison in one or the other's repo README could be useful [0]: https://github.com/matryer/xbar#advanced-apis https://github.com/matryer/xbar#advanced-apis [1]: https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar#refresh-schedule https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar#refresh-schedule [2]: https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/607 https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/607 [3]: https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/607#issuecomment-775205210 https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/607#issuecomment-7752...
jonpurdy 6y ago
I was wondering about why SwiftBar existed when there was already BitBar, and a lot is explained in this thread on Github: https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar/issues/95 https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar/issues/95 TL;DR: BitBar stopped working well in Big Sur and the old code base was increasingly hard to update and build.

bajsejohannes 6y ago

I can't find any reasons why it was rewritten. Was it C before? (I can't tell, because https://github.com/matryer/bitbar https://github.com/matryer/bitbar redirects to xbar)

spurgu 6y ago
Objective-C: https://web.archive.org/web/20210118051718/https://github.com/matryer/bitbar https://web.archive.org/web/20210118051718/https://github.co...
ihuman 6y ago
The old repo is archived in the new one https://github.com/matryer/xbar/tree/master/archive/bitbar https://github.com/matryer/xbar/tree/master/archive/bitbar

m12k 6y ago

I've been discovering more and more high quality open source apps for Mac recently. My other favorites so far: https://github.com/iterate-ch/cyberduck https://github.com/iterate-ch/cyberduck https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/sfsam/Itsycal https://github.com/sfsam/Itsycal https://github.com/newmarcel/KeepingYouAwake https://github.com/newmarcel/KeepingYouAwake

raju 6y ago
Along the same vein, this was posted a little while back on HN which lists a few other ones that I have found useful. https://onethingwell.org/ https://onethingwell.org/
tylerritchie 6y ago
KeepingYouAwake is nice (and I'm not about to pretend the following solution is good for everyone), however, I've found on the last couple of McBook fresh installs using caffeinate [1] from the terminal is sufficient. I usually have a terminal open anyway and `caffeinate -d -t 999999` usually does what I want (stay awake until I come back and tell you to go to sleep). Usually it's two keystrokes away (up arrow, enter), if not, that's quick enough to type for my purposes. That said, it's a bad approach if you want to suggest it as a tool for someone's workflow who _doesn't_ have a terminal open all of the time. [1] https://ss64.com/osx/caffeinate.html https://ss64.com/osx/caffeinate.html
- KMnO4 6y ago
  You can omit the -t and it will run forever.
- weaksauce 6y ago
  you can throw an alias in your .bashrc or .zshrc and have it even easier... alias caffeine="caffeinate -d -t 999999"
- uncledave 6y ago
  I tend to use caffeinate to wrap scripts only. I want it to go to sleep and stop eating all my electricity when it’s done.

jjice 6y ago

Bitbar-esque tools are fantastic. There are a wide variety on Linux, watching with slightly different formatting, but converting isn't a big pain. Being able to toss something together to display a portion of a curl call in a few minutes is great. I used to hate the top bar concept years ago when I was a windows user, but after switching to Unix for the past handful of years, I couldn't go back.

xtracto 6y ago
A couple of weeks ago I looked for a Bitbar alternative for Linux Mint/Cinnamon and there is really nothing. There's some implementation of the "Argos" app but it doesn't really work.

wrink 6y ago

Site is down :c 503

sdfhbdf 6y ago

Note that this is a rewrite/reboot from the original BitBar that is still marked as beta but has very frequent releases. There are more details about the motivations and such by the author in the announcement issue: https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/607 https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/607

imdsm 6y ago

This is quite weird. Saw BitBar on here about five years ago and started using it. Then today, having upgraded to Big Sur recently, I noticed it didn't look right. The update didn't work either, so I went to find the repo and saw it was now called XBar. I upgraded and moved my scripts across and forgot about it. Now what do I see when I come to HN for a quick break? XBar. More proof that life is just a simulation.

joshstrange 6y ago

Just updated from BitBar and ran into a small issue since xbar doesn't support custom plugin folders the same way BitBar did (as in a way to change it via the GUI). Thankfully you can just symlink the plugin folder to your old BitBar folder and everything works as expected. I opened an issue for it here: https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/653 https://github.com/matryer/xbar/issues/653

aquir 6y ago

It would be awesome to find something similar to windows...I can imagine "boosting up" my taskbar with this kind of stuff. If anyone knows a similar app to Windows please let us know

st0le 6y ago
Rainmeter is the closest thing to it.
matryer 6y ago
In the future, xbar might be able to support Windows :)

thamer 6y ago

I love BitBar and currently have 6 separate tools in my menu bar to keep track of things like Kubernetes instances in various QA environments, local services running on my machine (with stats + start/stop buttons + recent logs), or jobs running on cloud platforms. It's a fantastic tool and I'd encourage anyone who is thinking about building a tiny menubar app in just a few lines of code to look into it.

xtracto 6y ago
Agree, I have it monitoring my AWS consumption cost and ETH prices. Pretty handy.
- mellavora 6y ago
  Would you mind sharing a code example of how you do this? It sounds very helpful
  - kristofferR 6y ago
    Just download xbar, install some plugins through the included plugin browser, and check the source code. It's incredibly easy. If you can echo something in a shell script you can echo it in the menu bar.
  - xtracto 6y ago
    https://gist.github.com/obaqueiro/af4de922e9233e084057efcd668084d6 https://gist.github.com/obaqueiro/af4de922e9233e084057efcd66... https://gist.github.com/obaqueiro/4c8e679bb684f966a654f3aa999628e4 https://gist.github.com/obaqueiro/4c8e679bb684f966a654f3aa99... They are pretty handy
    - thamer 6y ago
      I'd suggest checking out jq for parsing JSON files: $ curl -s https://api.coinbase.com/v2/prices/ETH-USD/spot | jq -r .data.amount 1675.55
6y ago

sebastianmarkow 6y ago

http://www.hammerspoon.org/ http://www.hammerspoon.org/

permalac 6y ago
What do you use it for? How does it compare to keyboard maestro?
- mikeywazowski 6y ago
  I'm not the person you're asking, and I do most of my work on a PC running Linux now, but Hammerspoon is one of a few things I really miss about OSX. I mostly used it to create small utility applications for the menu bar. Probably the most useful one was a Bitbucket pull request checker, which would monitor the status of open pull requests and display information about which PRs I hadn't yet viewed or approved, number of new comments since I last viewed the PR, build status etc. My job involves frequently reviewing PRs so this was really helpful for me. I've tried rewriting this app for polybar on Linux but it's much more difficult to maintain, and sadly too much effort for me to bother with right now. I haven't tried Keyboard Maestro - at a glance it looks really good, but doesn't appear to be open source like Hammerspoon. I can't tell whether it enables you to create stuff for the menu bar. I'm pretty sure Hammerspoon can do anything KM can, but I imagine KM is easier to use, particularly if you're not into programming.

xbar 6y ago

Sup.

yurishimo 6y ago
Sup.

bloopernova 6y ago

My BitBar script displays the Unix epoch, comma separated: { 1,616,198,970 } Script is 2 lines: EPOCH=$(/bin/date +%s | /usr/local/opt/gnu-sed/libexec/gnubin/sed ':a;s/\B[0-9]\{3\}\>/,&/;ta') echo "{" "${EPOCH}" "}"

seanwilson 6y ago

BitBar is really cool. You can get something up and running in no time and it's fun to come up with some small personal automations. On this topic, does anyone know simple way on Mac to display a multiline text input pop-up? I'm playing with making a BitBar app that lets you keep a timesheet of what you've done today that syncs with a cloud API. I want a system tray icon that when you click it, it pops up with your notes so far that you can then edit and save your changes. I know you can use osascript to create an ugly text input pop-up but it gets dismissed when you hit enter which I don't want. I'm looking for something lightweight to setup. Likely using Node but would rather not have to require Electron.

themk 6y ago

I've been using barbly[0] which I wrote to scratch my own itch. It uses a JSON format for describing the menu bars which I found easier to work with. It's aesthetic is slightly different as well. [0] https://github.com/luke-clifton/barbly https://github.com/luke-clifton/barbly