Battstat is a simple battery monitor that I wrote for use with dwm and dunst, though it should be easy enough to use it with other window managers and notification daemons. It reports the status of the battery continuously, and provides low battery notifications via the notification daemon.

make

cp battstat $somewhere_in_your_path

When run, Battstat repeatedly outputs the status of the battery. It will look something like:

Charging (51%)

Or

Discharging (32%), 1:05:23

A new status line should come in roughly once per second. In my case, I have the following in my .xinitrc:

battstat | while read battinfo; do
    xsetroot -name "$(show-weather.sh) | $battinfo | $(date +'%a %d %h, %I:%M %p')"
done &

Which puts the battery status, along with some other information, in the dwm status bar (which just displays the root window's name). If you're using another window manager, you will have to find your own way to display the status.

Battstat will also emit two warnings to the running notification daemon (if any), When the battery has less than 20 minutes remaining, and again when it has less than 5 minutes remaining. It's worth noting that Battstat does not link against libnotify, rather it invokes the notify-send command to send messages instead (The libnotify api is much more complex to use than the cli).

ISC, see COPYING.