BitBar: Put the output of any script on your macOS menu bar | Hacker News Reader

BitBar: Put the output of any script on your macOS menu bar

getbitbar.com

239 pointspcr91030361 comments

I use this to show my type-1 son's continuous glucose monitor graph & numbers: https://github.com/pdaddyo/bitbar-nightscout. Wonderful tool!

I use it to list all my PRs, with icons for their approval/CI status alongside a list of PRs that are awaiting my review.

I like that the API is just outputting lines, but I wish there was more documentation.

I do the same thing, plus a few shortcuts I use a lot (open specific directories, clean directory etc).

Shortcuts to see or to run on clicking on it (which seems too much effort) ?

And how do you guys have so much space at the top? I only print my local IP address and its color ( red/blue) depending on whether my mitmproxy is running or not and I don't have whole lot of space left on my MBP 15".

Not sure what you mean with the first question.

All information is displayed in the drop down menu. I’ve thought about adding a number of actionable items as an indicator but.. haven’t needed it imo

> drop down menu

I see. I do not use it like that, hence i was confused. I just need it to see a particular text, like some status.

Hot tip for more space in your menu bar: Bartender — https://www.macbartender.com/

Another option is Vanilla: https://matthewpalmer.net/vanilla/

Yet another option: https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden

Bonus one https://github.com/Mortennn/Dozer/

Any chance you could share the script and a screenshot?

Last commit August 2016. Doesn't look like it's being maintained and I remember having issues that last time I used it.

I use Hammerspoon for a similar use case. Works great and updates roll out pretty regularly.

https://www.hammerspoon.org/

Wow, I always skipped over hammerspoon because I thought it was only for window management. My eyes are opened, this is great!

I use hammerspoon for a light/dark mode toggle as well

Repo owner is looking for maintainer as of November 5th. Check out the issue #495.

I believe there is a similar feature in a GNOME extension, called Argos, as well.

Argos is very useful. I use it to mount/unmount external drives, display power consumption, control VPN, a simple application launcher. Argos claims compatibility with BitBar. Argos claims to support JavaScript Gnome Shell execution -- I have no reason to doubt this (as Argos itself is a JavaScript Gnome Extension). I highly recommend Argos for Gnome 3 users.

Thank you! You won't believe that I've been looking for just this tool for the last several months (I've been searching along the lines of "i3 status bar for gnome-shell" but was unsuccessful).

Using argos with zenity let you provide inputs from prompted dialog in gnome make it feels like professional taskbar item :) you may find it tricky to execute a function inside your argos script and i found a simple way to make it works is to call the script itself and provide arguments to it. I wrote it here in my blog if you want a quick example to get started .

http://blog.ebfe.pw/posts/argos.html

All I want in my menu bar is a UTC clock next to my local clock.

Do we have a tool for that?

Seems like this tool might

I use UTCMenuClock:

https://github.com/netik/UTCMenuClock

Among other features, iStat Menus has a pretty flexible date line. I have a date + times in three zones.

Link?

https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

This is STILL something Windows has that Mac doesn’t. Windows supports multiple clocks natively.

Are you talking about additional clocks when you click on the Windows clock? Yeah, macOS has that too in the Notification Center (Today view, brought up by clicking the Notification Center button at the far end of the menu bar), allowing as many clocks as you want instead of a maximum of two. Plus the Windows clock can’t show seconds (without hacks) which is pretty infuriating.

Please ignore this if there’s a way to display multiple clocks on the Windows task bar natively.

Are you talking about the World Clock feature that doesn't support digital? Windows supports a 1 click view-all clocks from the taskbar. With MacOS, I have to click a few times to get to the "World Clock" module.

You click a few times to configure the world clock, but you only need to click once to view them. Not sure how that’s different from the Windows situation in any way.

(Btw I just noticed the clocks are analogue. I personally use the weather widget which in addition shows a digital clock for every city I communicate with on a regular basis.)

You could write that pretty easily if it's not already a plugin. I've been using bitbar for a couple of years now, it's great.

I just wrote this tiny script today after installing BitBar

    #!/bin/bash

    TZ=Europe/Berlin date +%H:%M

For UTC, you can use `date -u +%H:%M`

I've found ItsyCal to be wonderful: https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/

It can run alongside the system's menu bar clock. I've replaced the stock menu bar clock with "E yyyyMMdd-HHmm z" (so, for example, "Mon 20191216-1244 UTC"). And clicking it brings up a simple calendar. Simple and fast and works the way I think -- almost everything I want in a tool (wish it was open source).

I use The Clock.app from appstore for my multi-zone needs

Fun and useful tool. I created a button that will show me the NASA photo of the day: https://getbitbar.com/plugins/Science/apod.1h.py

The other ones in the Science category are also quite interesting.

I use this all the time to control a DNSCrypt proxy on MacOS: https://github.com/jedisct1/bitbar-dnscrypt-proxy-switcher

Confused this with AnyBar, it displays a simple colored icon in the Menu bar. I use it for displaying my local build status.

https://github.com/tonsky/AnyBar

Yeah, when I was looking for AnyBar once before, I kept bumping into BitBar.

I use this to monitor my binance portfolio value https://github.com/nishanthvijayan/BinanceBalanceMac

I use it to show a few things on my menu bar:

* My current task * The total time I have worked today * The time I have spent on the current session so far * GitHub notifications

You probably want also use something like [Bartender](https://www.macbartender.com) too to squeeze some more space out of the menu bar.

I use Bitbar to display my current Apple Music song in the menu bar.

Works pretty well, and it was easy to customize the iTunes script I downloaded from their user scripts page. Was nice when I went to Catalina and the only changed I needed to make was %s/iTunes/Music for the AppleScript target name change and the plugin just worked.

I love this tool. Here is the script I wrote to show how many ec2 instances I have running (so I remember to turn them off):

https://github.com/audy/bitbars/blob/master/ec2

Great tool. Call me a troglodyte, but I love the fact that it's written in ObjC, not Swift.

I was never a fan of ObjC to begin with, but I was never forced to use it and my disliked were really just ergonomic.

I’d call you a person of taste and sophistication.

But more objectively, it is always a pleasure to come to some open source code base and know you have few worries about language churn incurring a maintenance cost.

Windows equivalent?

Wondering the same thing. Can’t recall anything like it.

You could do something similar with AutoHotkey, I think. Of course you don’t have the option to have wide texts an graphs, but at least something of the size of an icon.

In X, you san use xsetroot. I have a few scripts to grab weather and time, and put these in my DWM status bar, refreshing every minute. Obviously this has a bit more eye candy but if you use Linux, you can approximate this pretty easily.

I've been using Bitbar for several years now. Very happy with it for what it does.

On my personal MBP, I use it to see when the GPU switches between dedicated and integrated. On my work laptop, I use it to see the current playing track on Spotify.

I love BitBar. I use it to constantly ping my router and Cloudflare. That way I know whether it's my router acting up or the ISP.

Also I've modified one of the weather plugins to also add wind speed and direction.

I use it to display the outside temperature, bitcoin price and whether my sony mx headphone is connected. Very useful tool.

How did you guys find out about bitbar before now? Product hunt? Reddit?

It's already been posted here a few times.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11064270

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17907922

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21797664

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17279599

Used with oathtools to easily display my enterprise one-time password

I use it to display and mute alarms on production env.

this is phenomenal and I look forward to using it, has anyone done something similar for linux distributions?

argos extension for Gnome 3. Compatible with BitBar

Knowing about Argos compatibility is super useful! Upvoted.

Windows version? No macs at work.

echo "KW"$(date +"%V")

Super useful for me!

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