Cnx: Release 0.3.0

August 1, 2021

Introduction

Cnx is a simple, yet powerful X11 status bar which can be used with window managers. It gets the data from generic properties defined in Extended Window Manager Hints.

It’s last release happened 2 years ago and I started working on it around 6 months ago.

Why Cnx

We have various X11 status bar like xmobar, polybar etc. But the reason I got interested in Cnx was:

Note that I had been using Xmobar for more than five years, but I was not very happy with it’s performance. I did attempt to improve it and you can find more details about this in my other blog post.

But despite the above work, I was not able to see significant improvement even if I used a single optimized widget in my Xmobar setup. This led me to believe that there is some overhead within Xmobar itself. The reason for this is the not so efficient event loop in Xmobar (despite the excellent work done by liskin on optimizing it). To give you a rough idea, this is my CPU consumption time when using Xmobar for around 9 hours:

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
sibi      3795  0.6  0.1 1076208404 34036 ?    Sl   10:38   4:10 sibi-xmobar

The TIME column above indicates the cumulative CPU time used by the process. In this case, Xmobar took a total time of 4 minutes and 10 seconds.

And similar statistics when using Cnx with a similar set of widgets:

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
sibi      5549  0.0  0.0 1191672 23740 tty1    Sl   09:17   0:11 cnx

So that’s a huge time difference but xmobar’s performance is good enough and it may not be worth worrying too much about it. I would also like to mention the caveat that Cnx is quite young and it has lesser number of widgets available compared to Xmobar. It could possibly have more bugs too. :-)

There is also i3status-rust written in Rust which seemed interesting to me. It has a pretty display and seemed more popular with a bigger community behind it. But unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work outside of sway or i3 because it works only on window managers that supports i3bar protocol.

My requirements

These are my requirements from a status bar:

This is how my Xmobar status bar looks (splitting into two images for better display):

Getting started with Cnx

When I started working on Cnx, its main branch seemed to be slightly different than the one published in Rust crates registry. For starters, it didn’t compile on Linux. The author of the program, Michael Killough had moved on to use OpenBSD and Cnx’s master version only compiled for that platform. I opened an issue about it and got a reply from the author in a couple of days. Part of the author’s response:

Unfortunately I’m not going to be able to help beyond merging PRs, and I may be quite slow to do that. Please don’t let that put you off though! I wrote Cnx because I wanted to write something that I could use (and I do, everyday!), so I’d encourage you to do the same. :-)

Given that the author was happy to accept my patches, I decided to go ahead with the implementation of the features that I required.

Cnx 0.3.0

Release 0.3.0 includes the following things:

let cpu_render = Box::new(|load| {
    let mut color = Color::yellow().to_hex();
    if load < 5 {
        color = Color::green().to_hex();
    }
    if load > 50 {
        color = Color::red().to_hex();
    }
   pango_markup_single_render(color, load);
});
let cpu = cpu::Cpu::new(attr.clone(), Some(cpu_render))?;

So you now have the ability to control it’s behavior programatically in Rust!

With the above changes, this is how my setup with Cnx looks like (splitting into three images for better clarity):

You can see that it’s pretty close to my Xmobar setup. I found Cnx’s rendering works slightly better because of Pango.

Using Cnx along with Xmonad

I currently use Cnx along with Xmonad and it was quite easy to integrate it. All you have to do is to use the ewmh function to add EWMH functionality to your configuration. A minimal working configuration will look like this:

import XMonad
import XMonad.Hooks.EwmhDesktops

main = xmonad $ ewmh def{ handleEventHook =
           handleEventHook def <+> fullscreenEventHook }

If you are interested to see my entire configuration, you can find it here. I start cnx via the hook I have defined in my configuration:

sibiStartupHook :: X ()
sibiStartupHook = do
  as <- io getArgs
  Bright.setBrightness 1260
  setWMName "LG3D"
  when (null as) $ do
    void $ startProcess (proc myTerminal [])
    void $ (startProcess (proc "emacs" ["--daemon"]))
    void $ startProcess "google-chrome-stable"
    void $ startProcess "cnx"

Writing new widgets

I really like how easy it is to implement a new widget for Cnx. All you have to do is this:

And that’s all! You can have a look at the various widgets inside cnx-contrib. The weather widget and clock widget are good starting points if you want to add new widgets.

Future

While I’m quite happy with the current state of Cnx, I believe Cnx is far from complete. Some of the things which would be nice to have are: