The simple way

"Bash simple curses" provides some basic functions to quickly create some windows on you terminal as Xterm, aterm, urxvt...

An example is given: bashbar that is a monitoring bar you can integrate in tiling desktop (Xmonad, WMii...).

The goal of Bash Simple Curses is not creating very complete windows. It is only made to create some colored windows and display informations into.

Why ?

Bash is very comple and has a great ecosystem, there are commands to do whatever you want. With curses you can create a little bar to display informations each second, you can change an output command to display a report...

So, we need an easy and usefull library to quickly create this kind of views. This is why you can try Bash Simple Curses.

Example: the bashbar

Bash bar is the given example that show system informations. You only have to resize your terminal window and place it on left or right. This screenshot is made on Xmonad:

It's implemented this way:

#!/bin/bash

. `dirname $0`/simple_curses.sh

main (){
    window "`hostname`" "red"
    append "`date`"
    addsep
    append_tabbed "Up since|`uptime | cut -f1 -d"," | sed 's/^ *//' | cut -f3- -d" "`" 2 "|"
    append_tabbed "Users:`uptime | cut -f2 -d"," | sed 's/^ *//'| cut -f1 -d" "`" 2
    append_tabbed "`awk '{print "Load average:" $1 " " $2 " " $3}' < /proc/loadavg`" 2
    endwin 

    window "Memory usage" "red"
    append_tabbed `cat /proc/meminfo | awk '/MemTotal/ {print "Total:" $2/1024}'` 2
    append_tabbed `cat /proc/meminfo | awk '/MemFree/ {print "Used:" $2/1024}'` 2
    endwin

    window "Processus taking memory and CPU" "green"
    for i in `seq 2 6`; do
        append_tabbed "`ps ax -o pid,rss,pcpu,ucmd --sort=-cpu,-rss | sed -n "$i,$i p" | awk '{printf "%s: %smo:  %s%%" , $4, $2/1024, $3 }'`" 3
    done
    endwin

    window "Last kernel messages" "blue"
    dmesg | tail -n 10 > /tmp/deskbar.dmesg
    while read line; do
        append_tabbed "$line" 1 "~"
    done < /tmp/deskbar.dmesg
    rm -f /tmp/deskbar.dmesg
    endwin

    window "Inet interfaces" "grey"
    _ifaces=$(for inet in `ifconfig | cut -f1 -d " " | sed -n "/./ p"`; do ifconfig $inet | awk 'BEGIN{printf "%s", "'"$inet"'"} /adr:/ {printf ":%s\n", $2}'|sed 's/adr://'; done)
    for ifac in $_ifaces; do
        append_tabbed  "$ifac" 2
    done
    endwin
}
main_loop 1

Another Example

this capture shows you that you can do whatever you want:

Code is:

#!/bin/bash

source $(dirname $0)/simple_curses.sh

main(){
    window "Test 1" "red" "33%"
    append "First simple window"
    endwin

    col_right 
    move_up

    window "Test 2" "red" "33%"
    append "Multiline is allowed !!!\nLike this :)"
    append "This is a new col here."
    endwin

    window "Test 3" "red" "33%"
    append "We can had some text, log..."
    endwin
    window "Test 4" "grey" "33%"
    append "Example using command"
    append "`date`"
    append "I only ask for date"
    endwin

    col_right 
    move_up
    window "Test 5" "red" "34%"
    append "We can add some little windows... rememeber that very long lines are wrapped to fit window !"
    endwin

    window "Little" "green" "12%"
    append "this is a simple\nlittle window"
    endwin
    col_right
    window "Other window" "blue" "22%"
    append "And this is\nanother little window"
    endwin

}
main_loop

Some other cool stuffs

And just with libcaca "img2txt" command, you can have fun:

Cool, isn't it ?