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Xbar: The BitBar reboot. Put anything in your macOS menu bar

xbarapp.com

31–40 of 54 posts

Re: Xbar: The BitBar reboot. Put anything in your macOS menu bar

#32
post #9

I've been discovering more and more high quality open source apps for Mac recently. My other favorites so far: https://github.com/iterate-ch/cyberduck https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/sfsam/Itsycal https://github.com/newmarcel/KeepingYouAwake

It's not open source but this is one of my favorites: https://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/Software/IPinmenubar.shtm...

Re: Xbar: The BitBar reboot. Put anything in your macOS menu bar

#33
post #28

I love BitBar and currently have 6 separate tools in my menu bar to keep track of things like Kubernetes instances in various QA environments, local services running on my machine (with stats + start/stop buttons + recent logs), or jobs running on cloud platforms. It's a fantastic tool and I'd encourage anyone who is thinking about building a tiny menubar app in just a few lines of code to look into it.

Agree, I have it monitoring my AWS consumption cost and ETH prices. Pretty handy.

Re: Xbar: The BitBar reboot. Put anything in your macOS menu bar

#34
post #10

Bitbar-esque tools are fantastic. There are a wide variety on Linux, watching with slightly different formatting, but converting isn't a big pain. Being able to toss something together to display a portion of a curl call in a few minutes is great. I used to hate the top bar concept years ago when I was a windows user, but after switching to Unix for the past handful of years, I couldn't go back.

A couple of weeks ago I looked for a Bitbar alternative for Linux Mint/Cinnamon and there is really nothing. There's some implementation of the "Argos" app but it doesn't really work.

Re: Xbar: The BitBar reboot. Put anything in your macOS menu bar

#35
post #28

I love BitBar and currently have 6 separate tools in my menu bar to keep track of things like Kubernetes instances in various QA environments, local services running on my machine (with stats + start/stop buttons + recent logs), or jobs running on cloud platforms. It's a fantastic tool and I'd encourage anyone who is thinking about building a tiny menubar app in just a few lines of code to look into it.

I personally use it just to display the currently playing track on Music--which actually solved a huge gap.

It was amazing to me that I couldn't find anything else to do just a basic "track playing" I could always see, without an always-on-top window blocking real estate. It seemed so obvious but nobody was offering that without adding a ton of other crap on top or making an intrusive windowed UI.

Then this little script executor with a per-menu output schema worked great. I was able to customize a basic "current track" script that either came with or was around as a plugin/sample and get it working to my exact spec within an hour.

What was especially awesome was when I moved to Catalina and the AppleScript targets changed from iTunes to Apple Music and broke automation, I was able to fix it in 30s by editing the script file for the new target name and it just worked. It was great to not have to wait on anyone else.

I'll definitely be trying the reboot.

Re: Xbar: The BitBar reboot. Put anything in your macOS menu bar

#36
post #9

I've been discovering more and more high quality open source apps for Mac recently. My other favorites so far: https://github.com/iterate-ch/cyberduck https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/sfsam/Itsycal https://github.com/newmarcel/KeepingYouAwake

It's not open source but this is one of my favorites: https://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/Software/IPinmenubar.shtm...

This can be done using xbar, trivially.

Re: Xbar: The BitBar reboot. Put anything in your macOS menu bar

#40
post #9

I've been discovering more and more high quality open source apps for Mac recently. My other favorites so far: https://github.com/iterate-ch/cyberduck https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/sfsam/Itsycal https://github.com/newmarcel/KeepingYouAwake

KeepingYouAwake is nice (and I'm not about to pretend the following solution is good for everyone), however, I've found on the last couple of McBook fresh installs using caffeinate [1] from the terminal is sufficient. I usually have a terminal open anyway and `caffeinate -d -t 999999` usually does what I want (stay awake until I come back and tell you to go to sleep). Usually it's two keystrokes away (up arrow, enter…

I tend to use caffeinate to wrap scripts only. I want it to go to sleep and stop eating all my electricity when it’s done.
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