 Hey everybody welcome back to the channel today I'm going to be showing you a little bit about Bumblebee status on i3 window manager. A few days ago I did a video about how to write i3 and in that video I installed Bumblebee status and used it for the first time. Since then I've been a little bit of research on it and I've decided to do a video going a little bit more in depth on what Bumblebee status is, how to use it and so on and so forth. Only when you're writing i3 one of the hardest things to do is decide what bar you're going to use. Now i3 comes with its own bar called i3 bar and there are tons of options out there, i3 status is an option, i3 blocks is an option, poly bars is an option, lemon bars is an option used, so on and so forth it goes on and on and on, there's so many different choices and each one of them is written in a different language, each one of them has slightly different ways of configuring it, some of them make you put more effort into getting to run multiple monitors, some of them won't run on multi monitors at all, some of them can be interacted with a mouse in easier ways. The point is there's just a ton of choice. One of the things that I enjoy about Bumblebee status is that there's a ton of stuff that's pre-configured and it's all done right from your i3 config file, so there's no dealing with extraneous configuration files unless you're going to start getting into developing your own themes and stuff like that, which I'll talk a little bit about, but mostly I'm going to be dealing today with the stuff that's pre-configured, so if we jump over to the github page, this is the github page here and it is written in python, so if you're going to get into the nitty gritty details of developing your own themes or doing your own modules or whatever, you have to do a little bit of python work probably, but for the most part if you're just going to use it, which as you can see up here I'm actually using Bumblebee status right now as my bar in i3, you really don't need to know python or anything because it's just within your i3 config file, which I can just show you my i3 config file if I can get to the right workspace and we'll just zoom in here, go to cd.config, i3, and then what we can do is vim into config and then just go down here at the bottom and we'll see what the configuration for Bumblebee status actually looks like, so status command is an i3 command within and then it's just the path to your Bumblebee status thing, then the modules you want, which are these things here, then it has an option for you to give a certain parameters for those modules that you've used, so in this case there's supposed to be a time module here which is right here, I have these in really a really weird order, I just noticed that right now that they usually have the time as the last thing instead of for here I have the volume for whatever is and that's the last thing, but it doesn't matter, but these parameters or whatever allow you to set certain rules for whatever module you've selected, so in this case it says the time format and then the last thing is it allows you to choose a theme, very, very simple, all that stuff is explained to you on their GitHub page, it gives you an example usage which is pretty much how I figured out how to use it, it's just copied and pasted it, I did go about the hard way and it shows you how to install it, now what I did here is actually we can just zoom in here and cd into .kafig, I3, oops, try again, all right and just do an LS here and you can see I did a bumblebee status and basically that was just doing get clone bumblebee status, this thing here, now this is specifically for Arch Linux, because it's basically building using the make package thing for Arch Linux, but there is an easier way to do this on other distributions as well, you can clone it from get and make it directly, you can use pip, I believe it's also probably in the AUR, now I would not recommend actually doing this directly from the AUR because it installs that stuff in a weird place, because you're going to need to find the like I did here in the config file, you have to be able to find where the binary of bumblebee status is in order for it to run, because basically this is just a script telling I3 to run this every time I3 starts, all that being said, it's very easy to set up, so you just put this in your I3 config file and it would generate this, now there are tons of premade themes, first of all, we'll talk about the themes, these are all the premade themes, now I'm just using Solarize, but I change the theme, let's change it to PowerLine, now I should note that you're really, most of these require you to have some kind of font that enables these little graphics and stuff, probably font awesome is the one that you're going to want to use, I think you could probably change it so that nerd font would work, they have similar glyphs and stuff that they use, but you will have to have those installed, that's one of the dependencies, so I'm just going to copy this and go back over to my configuration file and change this word here, down here, and change dollar sign and control V and write this and we'll start and see, as you can see, I changed the theme, that's how easy it is to think, if you were to do this on Polybar, just for example, Polybar is awesome, I mean, it's also written in Python, I believe, it has a great configuration file and you can just go through and change it and theme it to all your heart's content, but you'd have to go through to do the same thing, to change each of these colors, module by module, and it would take you, you know, a half an hour, an hour or something in order to go through and actually do this, whereas I just go through and, you know, use one of the pre-made themes, now obviously you can use a pre-made theme on Polybar as well, but it's harder because a lot of times those pre-made themes use different fonts, then what you might have installed in your system, they might have certain dependencies or something, they might use different modules, whatever, it's harder. This was obviously, as you can tell, it was very, very easy. Now, I mean, I'm just going to do it again, just to show, really, you got to remember, these are all mostly the same, these pre-made ones all look quite similar. Let's just choose another one here. This doesn't really matter which one I choose. Like I said, they're all pretty similar. Mostly what changes here is the colors, but let's just actually just choose this one here. We'll just change word here and w and control R and we've changed the theme again. That's really all there is to it. Now, you can also go through and obviously add different modules. So if we go here and go up here to the list of modules, these are a list of the modules that are available, CPU, and it gives you also a list of the parameters that you can use, date, date, time, debug, disk, Bumblebee status errors, which I don't really know why you want that in there. Git, that is weird. I mean, that's kind of, I mean, it's weird, but it's kind of cool. You could put your, the current branch of your Git in the bar instead of having it in your terminal. It's a little weird, but you can do it. Displays the current keyboard layout, the system load, memory, network interface. This is a good periodic, well, I can't say that would periodically check a, you know, website or something using ping, pulse audio, redshift, if you have redshift installed sensors for temperatures of your stuff, spacer, obviously a speed, your speed test using speed test CLI, which is interesting. So the way this works is you put speed, if you'd have speed test CLI installed, and use this module, every time you clicked it, it would check your internet speed. That's kind of cool. Time vault, copy passwords from a password store into a clipboard. I'm not exactly sure why you'd want that. But I mean, okay, X Rander, probably to choose your different, it allows you to enable or disable screens. Again, not sure why you'd want to do that from your bar. Amixor, which is another thing like Paul Paul audio, apt, which would display the apt package update information that tell you how to the number of updates, I guess, for apt a rander, arch update for this is for the AUR arch. Cool. I probably would use that battery. I mean, we're only in the bees. I'm not gonna go through all these I could sit here all days just go through the there are just tons. I mean, look, literally scrolling all the I mean, I know I'm going too fast, but look at all these modules, it's just insane. chances are, you'll never need to create a module ever. If you use this, I mean, and these are all this pre made. Now I understand I know that poly bar has a similar number of modules, probably. But they all require download you to download the script and put them in a script folder or put them in a modules folder or something it has to have some kind of corresponding file that goes along with it in order for it to run. That's the same with pretty much every bar. And I'm sure it's the same with us here. But you don't actually have to download these these are already available to you. So I'm just going to choose one here. Let's just choose network traffic. Alright, and then we're gonna go back to a our config file, and just up here. We'll change the battery, because I don't actually have a battery here and just write this much of our and now we have network traffic. That was literally all you needed to do. That's really cool. I mean, shouldn't be that impressive considering that you can do this with other modules but other bars. But the fact that it was just literally plug and play. I mean, that's just so good. So let's just take one small look at how you would go about developing your own theme. Easy creation of custom themes. This is how you do it. So bumblebee status themes are simply JSON files that describe various attributes, foreground color, background color, etc. etc. of the blocks that make up a status bar. It is possible to specify each attribute for at various levels for specific state of specific module for for specific module. Basically, what that means is that you can change the color based on a certain, like if you're using a CPU thing and it goes above a certain percentage, you could change the color, which is actually an option for one of those modules, the default values and so on. And literally just I mean, most of the stuff is just declaring what the colors of the things you want to use. And using fun awesome for the the icons. And it also allows you to figure out how to use this with firewall if you wanted to use it with firewall. There's just I mean, this is a small project. This is a small open source project. That it's by far not even the closest the the most widely used bar for i3 or any window manager. And yet it has fantastic documentation. This is I mean, this spec this, I can't even get over. I can't even talk about how awesome this this documentation is. I mean, it's just, it's amazing. It uses the same kind of style for this is kind of cute what Qtile does that it's actually designed the documentation at least is designed the same way Qtiles is. It has a frequently asked question. I mean, it's just it's so good. I can't get over I'm stuttering it's so good. So overall, if I had to say anything about this, I would say that bumblebee status is my favorite bar to use with i3. It's easy to configure. It's easy to download. It's easy to change your modules and put it out. I mean, there's just tons of stuff. My only thing that I would say is that I would really wish is that there was more preconfigured themes. I mean, really, there's only about 10 or 15 of them. And they're all really kind of the same. So I mean, if you don't like the whole power line aesthetic, you're probably going to create your own thing. But from what I just showed you, it'd be fairly easy to go through and create your own if you wanted to use something different. So I really, really like bumblebee status. I'm almost 100% positive I'm going to use it instead of poly bar because for the last year and a half or so when I was mostly a i3 user, I use poly bar and poly bar is great. But poly bar requires you to do some specific really launch dot sh thing, launch dot sh thing. If you want to go through and do it use it with multiple monitors, you have to create bars for multiple monitors. This was 100% automatic. I have it on both monitors. It works with the i3, you know, workspace indicators things right out of the box. No configuration for multiple monitors. It was fantastic. I'm kind of in love with it. It's kind of awesome. And it's kind of making me want to go through and use i3 again for a little while. Kinda. I think I'd probably miss the master stack like layout of DWM. But what I do think is that if I end up using Xmonad for a little while, I would probably use bumblebee instead of Xmo bar. Because my experiences with Xmo bar, at least so far, I got to remember I haven't gone through and actually delved into it all that much. My experiences with Xmo bar hasn't have not been that great. Just so far. So bumblebee status is probably going to be an option for me there. I'll probably I probably also use it with Spectre WM if I ever get back into that. Just because I mean, it's so good. It's I mean, literally, there's no configuration of it at all. So that is it for this video. If you liked it, give it a thumbs up. If you didn't give it a thumbs down, you can support the channel and in the number of ways the easiest way to do so is to subscribe. We're trying to get to 1000 subscribers by the end of the year. We're really, really close. And we might have actually got there by the time this video goes up or really close to 200, which is just phenomenal. I can't I mean, 200 subscribers doesn't sound you know, crazy. 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