Xfce Forum

budRich

Member

Registered: 2020-10-23

Posts: 2

genmonify: a genmon wrapper script to get hooked

Hello Everybody!

I switched to XFCE and Xfce-panel from polybar and noDE a couple of months ago.
Everything has been great, but there where a feature of polybar that i really missed, hook-modules.

I thought i would have to make a custom plugin to get it working in the panel, but it turns out that the genmon-plugin has something that is very similar. It is also similarly awkward to use it. For polybar I wrote a wrapper script (https://github.com/budlabs/polify), and since the behavior is so similar it was not a big deal making something similar for genmon, so i did:

https://github.com/budlabs/genmonify

There is a detailed description on github but in short, with this you can have your genmon plugins being updated with triggers/signals instead of using a set interval. Or I have my plugins set to the max time (24h).

in the example above I have set command to:genmonify -o test1.

Now I can update this genmon from anywhere with a command like this: 

genmonify -o test1 --iconclick "xfce4-taskmanager"      \
                              --foreground '#00FF00'    \
                              --icon dialog-warning     \
                              this is the text label

and it will get updated immediately. It is also possible to --clear a module, or use the --expiration-time option so one can use the genmons as notification thingies. Hence the name, notify -> polify -> genmonify ..

I should add that for everything to work, you need to set up an alias file, linking the "name" (in the example the name is 'test1') with the actual plugin-id, but there are instructions for that in the readme.

Maybe someone will find this useful, i know I will use it a lot. I will make a video on my youtube channel with a demonstration soon.