Show HN: BitBar – Put anything in your Mac OS X menu bar | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: BitBar – Put anything in your Mac OS X menu bar

getbitbar.com

149 pointsmatryer30 comments

I find Hammerspoon[0] ideal for this kind of thing, and dynamically scriptable in Lua too. [1]

[1] http://www.hammerspoon.org/go/#simplemenubar

I can vouch for Hammerspoon, it is an excellent scriptable Lua environment with built-in hooks for probably every native OS X feature you've ever wanted to script. Great project, I highly recommend it.

I just found Hammerspoon two days ago, and already it's become indispensable. Defeating paste-blockers on websites? Yes please!

Can you compare it to Keyboard Maestro, assuming you've tried it out.

KM is a lot easier to use than HS, but likely more frustrating for programmers.

Another Hammerspoon user chiming in. Discovered it one day and got hooked by how easy it is to get things done. This is coming from someone who never wrote any Lua before.

I love that you can create URI scheme triggers. It makes it so trivial to automate stuff in Hammerspoon from other tools.

What is the URL of he project? Nm, learned how to read entire post :)

Thanks for the link! This looks extremely handy for automating my dev workflow!

Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10835544

As far as the app, been sporting it for a while now and I really like it. Github is active as well.

I'm a big fan of menulets and scripting so this is great for me. Currently tracking sales. I use it with Bartender, so that it hides when the sales are not happening and pop up when something changes.

There's https://github.com/jaredks/rumps for Python.

Great Python package in combination with PySide you can build tiny desktop apps in just a few lines of code.

There is still an annoying bug that will create multiple BitBars in the menu bar.

https://github.com/matryer/bitbar/issues/21

I've been using it for a while. It's ace. A couple of plugins I've written for it:

List local vagrant boxes with statuses: https://gist.github.com/onion2k/3462b6effd55472aa192

Show your current HN karma (needs nodejs): https://gist.github.com/onion2k/2e7fe16d1bb568271f32

I love this app.

I connected it to my bank in order that I could watch my monthly spending through my menu bar [0]. Surprisingly useful way of managing money as it makes it impossible not to pay some attention.

[0] https://twitter.com/nouswaves/status/684396522675527680

I get "launch path not accessible" whichever plugin I try to run. :(

This happens to me, too, with a yellow triangle icon showing. Running in Terminal shows "No such file or directory" (strange since I even redownloaded it).

chmod +x plugin_name

Thank you, dear wizard!

Just as a quick sidenote: If your plugin directory is inside your User folder, it seems that you have to add the +x flag to your plugins.

Example: chmod +x pluginname.sh

I use it to display my (remote) docker uptime stats and the external/internal ip adres. It works quite nice.

This is really useful. I'm going to dump billings and use this to record time for invoicing to clients in a .yaml file and add a nice little preprocessor for creating a csv file for importing invoices into xero.

does something similar exist for Ubuntu?

In the past I made one using Electron, but then I checked Swift/OSX and ported there, loved the 8MB ram usage :D and settled there. But it's really easy to make one on Electron and have it cross-platform [1].

[1]: http://electron.atom.io/docs/v0.36.7/api/menu/

Cool!

Did you ever release yours on the app store? I'm struggling with electron packaging for the Apple app store and hoping to find a kindred soul to help get through it!

Depends on the desktop environment. I use xfce4-genmon-plugin, close enough?

I would love to see something as well-packaged, but for Linux. Most of the answers that people give end up being QT APIs or other dev tools. Bitbar is just so much easier... Put a shell script in a directory, and done. I would pay money for this in Ubuntu/Elementary OS.

Forgive my ignorance but how do I get a plugin to work with BitBar? There's no download button on Git for the reddit plugin (do I need to sign up for Github to see it?)

you can click the raw view link for the plugin's source and then save it to your plugin directory. Just make sure you set it's permissions correctly so bitbar can run the plugin. Instructions on permissions and such are here: https://github.com/matryer/bitbar#installing-plugins

Pervious discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10835544

Deja Vu. Saw this on here already before and if I remember correctly it made HN front page as well.

Still a cool project though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com