Battery status in tmux status bar in FreeBSD ============================================ Last edited: $Date: 2021/12/08 20:09:49 $ Ratpoison --------- On my FreeBSD laptop I switched back from the i3 window manager to the ratpoison window manager. I have been running ratpoison for more than a decade and only switched to i3 about two years ago. So, now I am back at ratpoison. In ratpoison, I have no dock or permanent visible status bar. tmux ----- I start tmux from my `.xinitrc` so it is always running in my first ratpoison window (window number zero). Most of the time I am in this window. So, the tmux status bar is a useful location for displaying the battery status. See also: gopher://box.matto.nl/0/start_tmux_from_xinitrc.txt Just enough information ----------------------- I don't need much information to be shown in the status bar. When the charger is connected, I want to know how far the charging is. When on battery, I want to know what the remaining battery time is. ### Script For this, I created a small script `~/bin/battery.sh``: #!/bin/sh STATE=`sysctl -n hw.acpi.battery.state` if [ $STATE -eq 2 ]; then echo "chg" $(sysctl hw.acpi.battery.life | cut -d : -f 2) "%" else echo "batt:" $(apm | grep time | head -n 1 | cut -d : -f 2,3) "h" fi ### Format This results in the following format: - When the charger is connected: `chg 86 %` - When on battery: `batt: 3:44 h` For me, this is just enough. ---------- In `.tmux.conf` there is the following line: set -g status-right "#(~/bin/battery.sh) | %A %d-%b-%y %H:%M" This displays the battery status, the day of the week, the date and the time (in 24 hours format) at the right side of the status bar, like `chg 88 % | Saturday 04-Dec-21 21:40`. Resources --------- See also this page: https://coderwall.com/p/bqw_tq/battery-status-in-tmux-status-bar