Sunday, November 12, 2017

How To: Remove part of i3's bar with i3status

The Problem
i3bar is perfectly simple. It's not this gaudy, in-your-face information supernova that Windows has been iterating on for the last ~20 years. It tells you just what you need to know: space left, internet speed, CPU load, and the time. But... what if you don't care about your internet speed? Or the time?

Thankfully, removing it is dead simple.

i3status.conf
If you're using the default i3status for your i3bar, the fix is simple. A configuration file in your home directory overrides the default in /etc/i3status.conf. (placing one in $HOME/.config/i3status/config will override the one in your home directory).

Setting the Overrides 
So, you have two options. You can make a NEW file in either of those locations, copying the existing data over. Or, you can edit /etc/i3status.conf directly as root (not recommended).

Using the documentation in man i3status and your existing file (/etc/i3status.conf), you should be able to find the commands you want. Then, make sure that only the commands you care about are in the order variable.

For instance, by default, my order looked like this:

order += "disk /"
order += "ethernet _first_"
order += "load"
order += "tztime local"
Since I don't care about my ethernet, I struck it. Resulting in this:

order += "disk /"
order += "load"
order += "tztime local"

No comments:

Post a Comment