Change Bar Status indicators

The X11 session (i3) and the Wayland session (sway) use different status bar programs:

X11: i3xrocks. Each status indicator is a separate i3xrocks-* package.
Wayland: i3status-rs, configured by a single file. The i3xrocks-* packages have no effect there; see Wayland (sway) below.

Adding or Removing status indicators

Finding Status Indicators

apt search i3xrocks-

Installing a Status Indicator

sudo apt install i3xrocks-memory
regolith-look refresh

To remove an indicator, remove its package (for example sudo apt remove i3xrocks-memory) and run regolith-look refresh.

Customization of the i3 bar

Each status indicator on the bar is managed by a file. The name of the file maps to the position of the status indicator on the bar, e.g. a file’s name starting with 10_ mean its corresponding indicator will be positioned before an indicator which has a configuration file starting with 20_. Within each file there is some information that i3xrocks uses to execute a script that ultimately returns the data you see on the bar. Some of the status indicators have configuration parameters that can be adjusted to your liking. For example, if you would prefer that the battery status changes more frequently, the polling interval can be updated. The first thing to do in order to customize the bar is to copy the indicators you wish to see from /usr/share/i3xrocks/conf.d/ to ~/.config/regolith3/i3xrocks/conf.d. Each file in ~/.config/regolith3/i3xrocks/conf.d can be modified as you see fit. To change the order of status indicators on the bar, simply change the name of the files to the sort order you prefer.

Once you’ve made your changes, refreshing the session should cause the bar to update based on your new configuration.

For example, to show the CPU indicator before the network traffic indicator and not display the memory indicator, perform the following steps (the files in /usr/share/i3xrocks/conf.d/ depend on the indicator packages you have installed):

$ ls /usr/share/i3xrocks/conf.d/
01_setup
30_net-traffic
40_cpu-usage
50_memory
90_time
$ mkdir -p ~/.config/regolith3/i3xrocks/conf.d
$ cp /usr/share/i3xrocks/conf.d/01_setup ~/.config/regolith3/i3xrocks/conf.d/01_setup
$ cp /usr/share/i3xrocks/conf.d/40_cpu-usage ~/.config/regolith3/i3xrocks/conf.d/20_cpu-usage
$ cp /usr/share/i3xrocks/conf.d/30_net-traffic ~/.config/regolith3/i3xrocks/conf.d/30_net-traffic
$ cp /usr/share/i3xrocks/conf.d/90_time ~/.config/regolith3/i3xrocks/conf.d/90_time
$ regolith-look refresh

In the above steps the following actions are performed:

The current i3xrocks modules are listed that exist in the directory created by regolith
The directory where user configuration lives is created at ~/.config/regolith3/i3xrocks/conf.d
Four files are copied from the application created directory to the user created directory. 01_setup holds the settings shared by all indicators, so keep it. Renaming 40_cpu-usage to 20_cpu-usage moves the CPU indicator in front of the network traffic indicator, and the memory indicator is not copied, so it is not shown
The regolith-look refresh command is run to refresh the Bar Status Indicators

Note: If the directory ~/.config/regolith3/i3xrocks/conf.d exists, the defaults in /usr/share/i3xrocks/conf.d/ are ignored, even if the directory is empty. Copy every indicator you want to keep, and remove the directory to go back to the defaults. Indicator packages you install later are not added to the bar until you copy their file as well.

Wayland (sway)

The sway bar runs i3status-rs with /etc/regolith/i3status-rust/config.toml. To change the indicators, copy that file, edit the copy, and point the Xresource wm.bar.status_config at it:

mkdir -p ~/.config/regolith3/i3status-rust
cp /etc/regolith/i3status-rust/config.toml ~/.config/regolith3/i3status-rust/config.toml
echo "wm.bar.status_config: ~/.config/regolith3/i3status-rust/config.toml" >> ~/.config/regolith3/Xresources

Each [[block]] section in the file is one indicator, shown in the order of the file. Remove a section to hide an indicator, move it to change the order, or add a block, for example the CPU indicator:

~/.config/regolith3/i3status-rust/config.toml

[[block]]
block = "cpu"

Then run regolith-look refresh. The available blocks and their options are described in the i3status-rust documentation.