Awesome Widgets - Introducing custom formatters and macros

This paper describes new major features of Awesome Widgets 3.2.0.

Formatters

Actually it has own graphical interface for configuration, but let me describe how to configure it by using your editor.

To apply formatters use $HOME/.local/share/awesomewidgets/formatters/formatters.ini file. It has only one section named [Formatters] in which keys are AW keys, values are related formatter names. For example,

[Formatters]
cpu=myformatter

means that formatter myformatter will be used for key cpu.

All formatters are stored in the same directory, one formatter per file, files should have .desktop extension. Each formatter has the following configuration fields inside [Desktop Entry] section:

Field	Required	Value	Default
Name	yes	formatter name	none
Comment	no	comment	empty
X-AW-ApiVersion	yes	API compatibility index. Do not touch it if you don’t know what does it mean	0
X-AW-Type	no	formatter type. The following types are supported: `NoFormat`, `DateTime`, `Float`, `Json`, `List`, `Script`, `String`	NoFormat

Additionaly the following fields will be added by common extesions: X-AW-Active, X-AW-Interval, X-AW-Number, X-AW-Schedule, X-AW-Socket, but they will be ignored.

Each formatter type has own behaviour and own settings and they are described below. Also there are system-wide settings which are stored in /usr/share/awesomewidgets/formatters/, system formatters will be overwritten by user defined ones, but formatter settings (i.e. formatters.ini) will be appended.

NoFormat formatter

Just puts value as string directly. It has no any special settings.

DateTime formatter

Converts QDateTime object to string.

Field	Required	Value	Default
X-AW-Format	yes	Qt specific format string	(empty)

Actually it is the same as $ctime tag and has the same configuration.

Float formatter

Converts any number to string.

Field	Required	Value	Default
X-AW-FillChar	no	char to fill number to `X-AW-Width`	(space)
X-AW-ForceWidth	no	strip string after `X-AW-Width`	false
X-AW-Format	no	Qt specific number format, supported values are `e`, `E`, `f`, `g`, `G`	`f`
X-AW-Multiplier	no	float to which value will be multiplied	1.0
X-AW-Precision	no	show this count of symbols after dot	-1 (as expected)
X-AW-Summand	no	float to which value will be increased	0.0
X-AW-Width	no	width of the field, negative means left-alignment	0 (do not limit)

Please note that actual formula is X-AW-Multiplier * value + X-AW-Summand.

Json formatter

Extracts values from json.

Field	Required	Value	Default
X-AW-Path	yes	path to json value	(empty)

Path should be separated only by dots. Numbers in path will be interpret as element index in array.

List formatter

Coverts list of string objects to string.

Field	Required	Value	Default
X-AW-Filter	no	filter by this regular expression	(empty)
X-AW-Separator	no	use this separator to join strings	(empty)
X-AW-Sort	no	boolean, sort or not list	false

String formatter

Improved version of NoFormat.

Field	Required	Value	Default
X-AW-FillChar	no	char to fill string to `X-AW-Width`	(space)
X-AW-ForceWidth	no	strip string after `X-AW-Width`	false
X-AW-Width	no	width of the field, negative means left-alignment	0 (do not limit)

Script formatter

Uses javascript code to convert value to string. Value will be passed as argument to fuction.

Field	Required	Value	Default
X-AW-AppendCode	no	prepend code by `(function(value) {` and append `})`	true
X-AW-Code	no	code for use
X-AW-HasReturn	no	if false will append your code by `return output;`. Only works if `X-AW-AppendCode` is `true`	false

Actually for example to covert download speed to kibibits on the fly you may use the following:

X-AW-AppendCode=true
X-AW-Code="output=value/8.0;"
X-AW-HasReturn=false

The code will be expanded to:

(function(value) {
  output = value / 8.0;
  return output;
})

Macros

Another new feature is macros. User may define any own function by using the following construction $aw_macro<my_macro_name,some_arg,another_arg>{{macro body here with $some_arg}}.

The first argument is macros name, which is required. Another ones describe arguments which will be passed to the macro call. Macro body may have any text (including templates, lambdas, etc) and arguments which are defined by using $.

To put defined macro to your code use the following construction: $aw_macro_my_macro_name<$cpu,$cpucl>{{}} (body will be ignored here). In this example macro will be expanded to macro body here with $cpu.