Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

xbarapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 54 posts

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

#41

Post by mellavora »

xtracto wrote: post #33
thamer wrote: 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.

Would you mind sharing a code example of how you do this? It sounds very helpful

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

#43

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

post_break wrote: post #32
m12k wrote: 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...

Related tip: if you hold Option and you click on the WiFi menu icon it'll show a detailed view which includes your local IP.

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

#44

Post by seanwilson »

BitBar is really cool. You can get something up and running in no time and it's fun to come up with some small personal automations.

On this topic, does anyone know simple way on Mac to display a multiline text input pop-up?

I'm playing with making a BitBar app that lets you keep a timesheet of what you've done today that syncs with a cloud API. I want a system tray icon that when you click it, it pops up with your notes so far that you can then edit and save your changes.

I know you can use osascript to create an ugly text input pop-up but it gets dismissed when you hit enter which I don't want. I'm looking for something lightweight to setup. Likely using Node but would rather not have to require Electron.

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

#46

Post by kristofferR »

mellavora wrote: post #41
xtracto wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Would you mind sharing a code example of how you do this? It sounds very helpful

Just download xbar, install some plugins through the included plugin browser, and check the source code. It's incredibly easy.

If you can echo something in a shell script you can echo it in the menu bar.

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

#47

Post by mikeywazowski »

permalac wrote: post #39
sebastianmarkow wrote: post #37

http://www.hammerspoon.org/

What do you use it for? How does it compare to keyboard maestro?

I'm not the person you're asking, and I do most of my work on a PC running Linux now, but Hammerspoon is one of a few things I really miss about OSX.

I mostly used it to create small utility applications for the menu bar. Probably the most useful one was a Bitbucket pull request checker, which would monitor the status of open pull requests and display information about which PRs I hadn't yet viewed or approved, number of new comments since I last viewed the PR, build status etc. My job involves frequently reviewing PRs so this was really helpful for me.

I've tried rewriting this app for polybar on Linux but it's much more difficult to maintain, and sadly too much effort for me to bother with right now.

I haven't tried Keyboard Maestro - at a glance it looks really good, but doesn't appear to be open source like Hammerspoon. I can't tell whether it enables you to create stuff for the menu bar. I'm pretty sure Hammerspoon can do anything KM can, but I imagine KM is easier to use, particularly if you're not into programming.

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

#48

Post by [deleted] »

justwalt wrote: post #23
9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a huge, huge fan of hammerspoon. It's replaced so many other small utilities for me.

When I started using a Mac for work, the fact that so much functionality which is available free on Linux was now locked behind a paywall in the App Store was frustrating. Hammerspoon gave me basically all of it back, in a scriptable form which makes it much better suited to what I want. It’s truly great software.

[deleted]

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

#49

Post by 9935c101ab17a66 »

justwalt wrote: post #23
9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a huge, huge fan of hammerspoon. It's replaced so many other small utilities for me.

When I started using a Mac for work, the fact that so much functionality which is available free on Linux was now locked behind a paywall in the App Store was frustrating. Hammerspoon gave me basically all of it back, in a scriptable form which makes it much better suited to what I want. It’s truly great software.

Yah I’ve been able to implement so many different features, and I love doing it myself not just because I don’t have to spend money on software (I’m perfectly willing to do that). I just hate having a myriad of single use third party utilities scattered around my hard drive and cluttering up my OS. I don’t know if I’ve just become more aware, or apps have gotten worse, but so many apps have opaque and undesirable behaviours / scopes nowadays.
Post reply on HN