Pomobar

Pomobar is a pomodoro timer for Xmobar. It strives to be highly customisable, keyboard-centric, lightweight and minimalist. Although it was designed for being used with the Pomodoro Technique, it can also be used as a generic timer. It provides the following features:

• Timer control over D-Bus
• Colour customisation
• Shell command execution on timer termination

Building

Pomobar is built by using Stack. After cloning the repository, run stack setup and then stack build.

Installing

You can download the binary straight from the GitHub releases page or you can install it using Stack by issuing `stack install` from the repository directory.

Configuring Xmobar

Pomobar can be used in Xmobar through CommandReader as demonstrated in the following example.

-- Pomobar
, Run CommandReader "killall pomobar; ~/.local/bin/pomobar --terminatedShellCmd='mpg123 -q ~/bin/share/alarmwatch.mp3'" "pomobar"

Using killall pomobar before starting Pomobar is a good idea since when restarting Xmonad previous CommandReader processes are not terminated. Leaving previous Pomobar processes running will cause conflicts in D-Bus, causing the new Pomobar instance to not respond to D-Bus commands.

In the above example we also used the option terminatedShellCmd to play an alarm sound when the timer terminates. This option could also be used to display a visual notification for example. All the Pomobar options will be listed in a later section.

Don’t forget adding a %pomobar% to your Xmobar template.

Configuring Xmonad

In xmonad.hs add the hotkeys to control Pomobar. A configuration example is shown below.

-- Pomobar
, ((modm  , xK_F5      ), spawn "dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.pomobar /org/pomobar org.Pomobar.startTimerSwitch array:int16:25,10,5")
, ((modm  , xK_F6      ), spawn "dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.pomobar /org/pomobar org.Pomobar.pauseResumeTimer")
, ((modm  , xK_F7      ), spawn "dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.pomobar /org/pomobar org.Pomobar.timerAddMin int16:1")
, ((modm  , xK_F8      ), spawn "dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.pomobar /org/pomobar org.Pomobar.timerAddMin int16:-1")

pomobar options

Running pomobar --help displays all available command options:

pomobar - A customisable pomodoro timer for Xmonad

Usage: pomobar [--runningFgColour ARG] [--pausedFgColour ARG]
               [--terminatingFgColour ARG] [--terminatedFg1Colour ARG]
               [--terminatedBg1Colour ARG] [--terminatedFg2Colour ARG]
               [--terminatedBg2Colour ARG] [--terminatedBlinkRate ARG]
               [--terminatedShellCmd ARG]
  Creates a pomodoro timer.

Available options:
  --runningFgColour ARG       FG running colour
  --pausedFgColour ARG        FG paused colour
  --terminatingFgColour ARG   FG terminating colour
  --terminatedFg1Colour ARG   FG1 terminated colour
  --terminatedBg1Colour ARG   BG1 terminated colour
  --terminatedFg2Colour ARG   FG2 terminated colour
  --terminatedBg2Colour ARG   BG2 terminated colour
  --terminatedBlinkRate ARG   Terminated blink rate in nanoseconds
  --terminatedShellCmd ARG    Shell command to be executed and timer terminates
  -h,--help                   Show this help text

D-Bus

Pomobar provides the following D-Bus methods under the interface org.Pomobar available on the path /org/Pomobar:

• startTimer(Int16)

Starts the timer for the given period (in minutes).

• startTimerSwitch([Int16])

Loops through the given periods (in minutes) to start the timer. This method is useful to utilise the same hotkey to start the timer for different periods. When pressing the hotkey in succession (less than 1 second between presses) it loops through the given timer periods.

• pauseResumeTimer()

It pauses or resumes the timer depending on its status.

• timerAddMin(Int16)

Adds minutes to timer, or subtracts if a negative number is provided.

Potential enhancements

This is a list of potential enhancements that may be implemented in the future:

• Make Pomobar a Xmobar plugin.
• Add configuration to define D-Bus path. This would allow multiple timers running concurrently and being controlled by D-Bus without conflicting with each other.
• Implement other stdout types to make Pomobar compatible with other status bars such as dzen.