Create status bar menus for macOS from executables.
Allows you to place the stdout of a process in the macOS status bar.
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.
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 ---
.
See the scripts in the scripts directory for some examples.