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Comment by abcdabcd987 | Hacker News Reader

Just want to mention bitbar[1]. Write anything to stdout, it'll make it show up in the menu bar.

Oh, this is perfect! It’s been annoying me for a while that the system menu bar clock in macOS doesn’t allow me to format the current date in ISO 8601 format.

Bitbar will solve this for me! I’ll change the system clock to only show the day of week and the time, and then I’ll use Bitbar in order to give me the ISO 8601 date in my menu bar! :D

Edit: Neat! Someone already made a plug-in for BitBar to do this so I don’t even have to spend any time writing anything at all. And look at that, they even thought about it one step further and made it so that you can copy the date to your clipboard by clicking on it! https://getbitbar.com/plugins/Time/date-picker.1m.sh

Edit 2: Initially copy to clipboard wasn’t working but I modified the script a little bit, removing the space before each bash= and putting single quotes around each $0 and now it works.

Edit 3: I submitted a PR for the above-mentioned change https://github.com/matryer/bitbar-plugins/pull/1471

Another good option for a fully customizable menubar clock is Itsycal, which as its name implies also serves as a small popup calendar that shows events from system calendar accounts.

https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/

I made something similar for myself, but my needs were to see local and UTC time, and to copy current unix timestamp and current ISO date-time string.

Also has some typographic trickery so the width of time shown is always constant, and doesn't "flicker" on the menu bar moving other icons by few pixels every minute.

Here it is in a gist: https://gist.github.com/erkiesken/e13943550c4b2ba03779d5eac5...

The author has been weirdly reluctant to support new OS features, but I've been using Day-O[1] for years, it has a customizable time format[2] that could easily do 8601

[1] https://shauninman.com/archive/2016/10/20/day_o_2_mac_menu_b... [2] https://shauninman.com/day-o/datetime.html

Bitbar is amazing. Its become a dashboard for my life.

What sort of things do you display with it?

Not OP as well but I love BitBar. I use it as a catch-all status and action menu at work. Here’s what I have:

- Display current git branch, useful for quickly looking up the task and task ID when I need to write it somewhere.

- Poll develop branch, parse and display the current sub module commit. Again for quick lookup when I need to reset that repo.

- A list of PRs and their status and ID (just open the menu to see the ID so I can easily find the relevant build in eg CI)

- A couple of bookmarks for usual websites to open

- A couple of bash scripts to delete certain folders

- A couple of shortcuts to open specific folders (eg snapshot folder)

- A simple HTTP status of a website I manage (it tended to break often, now I see if it is down within a minute)

Basically anything I do on a semi regular basis is literally one click away. I cannot recommend this tool enough.

Not parent, but I have bitbar menus for ssh’ing to digitalocean boxes, connecting to corporate vpn, and displaying uptime information from uptimerobot.

I didn't know about bitbar. I myself use textbar: http://richsomerfield.com/apps/textbar

I wish I knew about this as I paid for textbar.

I love bitbar, but I wish it can have separate processes/interface for each widget. I use Dozer, and everytime it updates all of the BitBar widgets gets hidden.

Is there a way to get Zoom / Meeting , or even just Calendar, on my BitBar?

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