Parse the output of acpi down to something simple.
apci is great at reading battery data but bad at putting in a statusbar.
To download shortacpi, run
wget https://raw.github.com/rperce/shortacpi/master/shortacpi
chmod a+x shortacpi
and then move it to somewhere in your PATH, e.g.
sudo mv shortacpi /usr/local/bin/
shortacpi works from any command-line that can see your PATH, or if you have a window manager that lets you create custom widgets of some sort (I use awesomewm), it's perfectly suited to live in a statusbar.
(Below I make several references to ~/.config/awesome/. This will work for most users, but if the output of echo $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is neither empty nor /home/<user>/.config/, use that config directory instead.)
If, like me, you use awesomewm, you can easily add this to your statusbar as a widget. If you're not using a custom rc.lua, execute
mkdir -p ~/.config/awesome
cp /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua ~/.config/awesome/
Now you have a custom rc.lua.
Open the file ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua in the editor of your choice.
In the file, search for -- {{{ Wibox; for me it was line 112. Below that add the following:
batterywidget = widget({ type = "textbox" })
batterywidget.text = " | Battery | "
batterytimer = timer({ timeout = 5 })
batterytimer:add_signal("timeout",
function()
fh = assert(io.popen("shortacpi", "r"))
text = fh:read("*l*")
if text ~= nil then
batterywidget.text = " | "..text.." | "
end
fh:close()
end
)
batterytimer:start()
On line two, " | Battery | " is whatever you want the widget to say before it polls acpi for battery status. I like to separate my statusbar widgets with pipes, so I added those there. If you don't like them, remove them from line 9 as well (" | "..text.." | "); the .. syntax is the lua operator for string concatenation.
On line three, timeout = 5 indicates that the display will update every five seconds. Change the number to your liking.
Now search for Create a promptbox for each screen. A few lines below that should be the line mywibox[s].widgets = {, followed by several things. One of these should be mylayoutbox[s]; from that to the end of the group (the next }) is what shows up on the right side of your statusbar in right-to-left order. My rc.lua has mytextclock as the next entry; I wanted my battery widget to the left of the clock, so on the following line I entered batterywidget,. Place that line wherever you want, but make sure it is inside the group begun by the earlier line mywibox[s].widgets = {.
Once this edit is complete, exit the editor program and in a shell run awesome -k. If the output is ✔ Configuration file syntax OK., you're done! Restart awesome with, by default, Mod4-Shift-R and the battery widget should appear. If it displays something different, something is wrong. Email me or ask a forum or google for more information.