Barbly

Barbly allows you to create status bar menus for macOS. It's similar to bitbar and supports some of the same syntax.

Each instance of a barbly executable creates only one menu item. You specify the period at which to refresh, and the command to generate the menu contents.

Sample Scripts

Some sample scripts that are useful to use with barbly can be found in the scripts directory.

Here is an example of running the github_issues.sh script with barbly to monitor for new issues.

barbly -p 60 ./scripts/github_issues.sh nixos nixpkgs

Clicking on an item will open the issue in your browser.

Other Features

Check FD

Barbly can create a file descriptor in the child processes that can be used to indicate that the bar should be refreshed immediately. Use --checkfd VARNAME to enable this feature. Barbly will save the file descriptor number into the environment variable VARNAME, and the child processes can write a newline character to this file descriptor to cause an immediate refresh.

Syntax

Barbly can decode either JSON objects or BitBar syntax for the script outputs. By default, it will attempt to auto-detect the format, but you can explicitly tell it which format to use with the --json and --bitbar flags.

JSON

The top level object has two fields, title, which is a string that will be displayed in the status bar, and items which is an array of menu items that will be displayed in the drop down menu when the title is clicked.

Each menu item is either {}, which creates a menu separator, or an object with a label field, which will be the text for that menu item. Optionally a menu item can have either an exec or a items field. An items field would contain an array of menu items and would create a sub-menu. An exec field would create a clickable menu item which executes the command described by the array of strings in the exec field.

{
  "title": "Example",
  "items": [
    {
      "label": "Say Hello",
      "exec": [ "say", "Hello" ]
    },
    {},
    {
      "label": "Sub Menu",
      "items": [
        {
          "label": "DuckDuckGo",
          "exec": [ "open", "https://duckduckgo.com/" ]
        }
      ]
    },
    { "label": "Information Only" }
  ]
}

BitBar

The bitbar simulation is not complete. Only the following features are supported.

The text that appears in the status bar is the output of the script up until a line containing only ---.

After this, each line represents an item in a drop down menu. Submenus can be nested arbitrarily by prefixing the line with -- (one pair for each level of nesting).

Each line can contain some paramters which appear after the first | as key value pairs separated by an =.

Paramter Name	Effect	Example
`href`	Open the given URL or file.	href=https://www.google.com
		href=/Applications/Firefox.app
`bash`	Run the given bash script	bash=/my/script.bash
`paramX`	Arguments to pass to the bash script above	bash=/script.sh param1=5 param2=example

Menu separators can be created with lines containing only ---.

Example Scripts

See the scripts in the scripts directory for some examples.

Multiple Menus

Because each instance of barbly creates just one menu, you need to launch multiple processes to get multiple menus. If you launch them all from a script, this can cause the order of the resulting menu items to depend on the whims of the scheduler. This can be alleviated by yielding between spawning each process. A yield can be achieved by sleeping the process for 0 seconds.

luke-clifton / barbly