i3status is a small program (about 1500 SLOC) for generating a status bar for i3bar, dzen2, xmobar or similar programs. It is designed to be very efficient by issuing a very small number of system calls, as one generally wants to update such a status line every second. This ensures that even under high load, your status bar is updated correctly. Also, it saves a bit of energy by not hogging your CPU as much as spawning the corresponding amount of shell commands would.

i3status has the following dependencies:

• libconfuse-dev
• libyajl-dev
• libasound2-dev
• libnl-genl-3-dev
• libcap2-bin (for getting network status without root permissions)
• asciidoc (only for the documentation)
• libpulse-dev (for getting the current volume using PulseAudio)

On debian-based systems, the following line will install all requirements:

apt-get install libconfuse-dev libyajl-dev libasound2-dev libiw-dev asciidoc libcap2-bin libpulse-dev libnl-genl-3-dev

i3status is developed at https://github.com/i3/i3status

Compiling is done with the usual make-line

  make && sudo make install