Comment by tombert

Comment by tombert 5 days ago

I wanted some extra functionality for the Swaybar in the Sway Window Manager. I got a basic thing working with Bash, but I wanted more stuff, and so I rewrote it in Clojure with GraalVM.

I think it's kind of cool, I ended up with a fairly elaborate async framework with multimethods and lots of configuration, and the entire thing has almost no "real" blocking, and can persist state so that it can survive restarts.

The reason for async support was so that I can easily have my Swaybar ping HTTP endpoints and display stuff, without it affecting the synchronous data in the bar. I have TTLs in order to rate-limit stuff, and also have click-event support.

Right now, I have it ping OpenAI to generate a stupid inspirational quote based on something from a list of about two-hundred topics. Right now on the top of my bar it says:

> "Let the flame-grilled passion of life's challenges be your fuel for success" - Patty Royale

I think it's kind of cool, it's building with Nix so it should be reproducible, and with GraalVM, it hovers at around 12-15 megs of RAM on my machine.

vhantz 4 days ago

Really interesting. I'm bookmarking your comment for later.

One thing you can do is separate the information fetching from your bar completely. I have a service that runs every minute or so to fetch available updates from the arch repositories (including aur), it writes its output to a file and then my bar regularly updates it's displayed information based on that file.

I don't have the service definition uploaded anywhere, but you can see how simple it is to then integrate it with anything here [1]. This is a status bar I'm building with qml. It's not ready to be released yet, I'm at 0.7.0. Only tested on x11/i3wm so far. Last time I launched it in wayland/sway, there were some issues but it's been a while since. Since it's built with qt complex and non-blocking interactions are available out of the box. For example, switching workspace by clicking an icon in the bar, or switching the format of the displayed date time.

[1] https://git.sr.ht/~hantz/buffalo/refs/0.7.0

Reply View 1 reply

tombert 4 days ago

Yeah, the current design is kind of an iterative process; I started with a considerably simpler thing that just had the clock and date and currently selected program, and then I thought it might be neat to try and add add some async stuff and it ballooned from there.
I do have the state persisted in a msgpack binary, but the data fetching is done within the app. I don’t know that separating it out would necessarily be better, I kind of like that I have the pipeline set up on such a way that the fetching for sync and async stuff can be reused.
I am debating rewriting this to use the slightly lower level NIO selector class instead of core.async, but the memory on this is low enough to where I am not sure that it’s worth it.
I have been writing a lot of helper apps in Rust for Sway as well, mostly as an excuse to play with Rust more [1] [2].
I will take a look at your stuff. I have wanted an excuse to learn a bit more about Qt.
[1] https://github.com/Tombert/rs-new-sway-workspace
[2] https://github.com/Tombert/sway-workspace-indexer

Reply View | 0 replies