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[edit] Introduction

From the dzen website:

"Dzen is a general purpose messaging, notification and menuing program for X11. It was desigend to be scriptable in any language and integrate well with window managers like dwm, wmii and xmonad though it will work with any windowmanger."

[edit] Installation

dzen is available from the community repository:

# pacman -S dzen2

[edit] Tips & Tricks

[edit] Dzen & conky-cli

conky-cli, a stripped-down version of the Conky status utility, can be used to pipe information directly to dzen for output in a statusbar. The following example displays the the loadavg values in red and the current time in the default dzen foreground colour:

~/.conkyrc:

background no
out_to_console yes
update_interval 1.0
total_run_times 0
use_spacer no

TEXT
^fg(#ff0000)${loadavg 1 2 3} ^fg()${time %a %b %d %I:%M%P}

~/bin/dzconky:

#!/bin/sh

FG='#aaaaaa'
BG='#1a1a1a'
FONT='-*-terminus-*-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*'
conky | dzen2 -e  -h '16' -w '600' -ta r -fg $FG -bg $BG -fn $FONT

Simply execute dzconky in your startup scripts.