Mac toolbar widgets with xbar and rust
January 18, 2025 3 minute read
(aside - I have some much bigger blog ideas but haven’t had the time to write them properly - so here’s just a small thing I find handy)
XBar is a nifty tool for Mac OSX machines which puts little UI widgets on your toolbar. (It started as an older project called Bitbar, which was abandoned for a while - there is a similar alternative called SwiftBar for those who want options)
One of the marvellous things about XBar is how very simple it is. It very much follows the “Unix philosophy” - every plugin is a very simple executable script - if it succeeds (e.g. exit status 0) then the STDOUT is parsed and used to display a toolbar widget. If it fails, then STDOUT is parsed and displayed on an error widget.
If you copy the above to an executable file in ~/Library/Application\ Support/xbar/plugins/ow.1m.sh and refresh XBar, it will show up as a little drop-down menu:
