slstatus is a small tool for providing system status information to other programs over the EWMH property of the root window (used by dwm(1)) or standard input/output. It is designed to be as efficient as possible by only issuing the minimum of system calls required.

• Battery percentage/state/time left
• Cat (read file)
• CPU usage
• CPU frequency
• Custom shell commands
• Date and time
• Disk status (free storage, percentage, total storage and used storage)
• Available entropy
• Username/GID/UID
• Hostname
• IP address (IPv4 and IPv6)
• Kernel version
• Keyboard indicators
• Keymap
• Load average
• Network speeds (RX and TX)
• Number of files in a directory (hint: Maildir)
• Memory status (free memory, percentage, total memory and used memory)
• Swap status (free swap, percentage, total swap and used swap)
• Temperature
• Uptime
• Volume percentage
• WiFi signal percentage and ESSID

Currently slstatus works on FreeBSD, Linux and OpenBSD. In order to build slstatus you need the Xlib header files.

• For volume percentage on Linux the kernel module snd-mixer-oss must be loaded.
• For volume percentage on FreeBSD, sndio must be installed.

Edit config.mk to match your local setup (slstatus is installed into the /usr/local namespace by default).

Afterwards enter the following command to build and install slstatus (if necessary as root):

  make clean install

See the man page for details.

slstatus can be customized by creating a custom config.h and (re)compiling the source code. This keeps it fast, secure and simple.