xbar is really cool.

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Recently, I found a very, very useful app for the Mac called xbar. It’s free and incredibly powerful and community-driven. Here is the link: xbar.

What it does is it puts a litle thing in your menu bar up top where you can load an enormous amount of plugins. These are written by all sorts of other people and fully open source. You have to figure out a little bit of code, like where your own directories are etc… but you can install these plugins, edit them to fit your needs (the code is fully public so there won’t be any hacking of your system), and make it do whatever you want it to do. If you know Perl or Python or just shell scripting, you can even write your own.

It basically makes the menu bar accessible to whatever kind of scripting you need and want at a moment’s glance. There is a public repo built in with many different kinds of plugins or, as I’ve said, you can just write your own to do anything from show you different statuses of your machine, running a command, checking on an email count of unread messages in emacs/mu4e, playing with itunes controls, logging into different servers at the click of a button, and more. Anything that your shell can run, it can run in the menu bar for you.

It can even run weather checking statuses for you if you want. The list is huge.

I highly recommend checking it out.