Since a little over a month ago, i3bar supports inline pango markup for styling your statusline and workspaces¹. So after figuring this out, this past weekend I took some time to redo my statusline.

I wrote a small ruby script to serve my i3 statusline command which generates little aesthetic blocks (styled with Pango markup) for time, weather, network, audio level, and power... looking like:

Each block I define as a hash, specifying symbol, color, and the function which returns the data to display:

blocks = [
    {
        :symbol => "↬",
        :color=> "#530067",
        :text => fetchers.network
    }, ...
]

Where fetchers holds some functions for retrieving system data:

class InfoFetchers
  def network
    %x[netctl list].split("\n").select { |n| 
      n if n[0] == "*"
    }.first.gsub!("* ", "")
  end ...
end
fetchers = Info_Fetchers.new

Each block gets passed through a map function to stylize with Pango ³. This way I get a consistent feel for each block and I keep my code DRY. The final output is assembled as JSON and passed onto i3bar:

blocks.map do |f|
   text = [
       "<span rise='10000' size='large' underline_color='#ffffff' underline='double'>",
      "<span bgcolor='#{f[:color]}' fgcolor='#ffffff'> #{f[:symbol]} </span>",
      "</span>",

      "<span rise='10000' size='8900' underline='double' underline_color='#ececec'>",
      "<span fgcolor='#2b2b2b' bgcolor='#f9f9f9'> #{f[:text]} </span>",
      "</span>"
    ].join

    {
      :separator => false,
      :separator_block_width => 10,
      :align => 'left',
      :min_width => 0,
      :full_text => text,
      :markup => 'pango'
    }
end.to_json

So yeah -- Pango + i3bar is nice. Feel free to steal my status bar generating script featuring the block aesthetic. It took me a while to get Pango to cooperate, so I hope I'll save some folks some effort!

Thanks to acrisci who was the one who dropped Pango into i3 upstream.