Syntactic Bay Leaves Pungent programming, and other topics of note

It's been a long time since I switched to Linux, but I've been running Arch Linux instead of Mint for a few years now. My current workstation is a Dell XPS 13, which is a really lightweight, pleasantly designed device whose hardware is all well-supported on Linux.

The main weak point is its integrated graphics card, which I found couldn't drive an external 1080p monitor on its own without stuttering. I bought the Dell TB16 Dock to drive the monitor, which fixed the problem nicely with minimal fuss. Now I can use an external monitor like a normal person!

But! The fans are always on high when I'm plugged into the dock and using the external monitor. I got concerned about the cpu temperature, so started monitoring it with a simple watch command:

$ watch -n 1 sensors
Every 1.0s: sensors                       xps13-arch: Sun Jun 18 14:47:16 2017
coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Package id 0:  +53.0°C  (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:        +52.0°C  (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:        +52.0°C  (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:        +25.0°C  (crit = +107.0°C)
temp2:        +27.8°C  (crit = +105.0°C)
temp3:        +29.8°C  (crit = +105.0°C)

iwlwifi-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:        +37.0°C

pch_skylake-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:        +49.5°C

I thought it would be cool to see temperature in a more minimal way on my taskbar. Since I used Awesome as my window manager, I have pretty fine-grained control over the UI, so instead of installing a standalone app just for the temperature, I decided to learn a little bit about Awesome's text widget api so I can translate my command line call into data that drives a text widget. This is what I came up with:

-- Instantiate a new textbox widget
local tempwidget = wibox.widget.textbox()

-- The shell command to run. In this case, we call sensors in a for loop,
-- sleeping 5s in between each call. We pass -u to sensors to get raw
-- unformatted data from it, and coretemp-isa-0000 tells it to get just
-- my cpu's temperature. We pipe that output into awk to get just the
-- numeric value.
local cmd = [[bash -c "
while true; do
    sensors -u coretemp-isa-0000 | awk '/temp1_input/ { print  }'
    sleep 5
done
"]]

-- The shell command is a blocking call but we don't want to block
-- the rest of the UI waiting on it, so we use Awesome's
-- awful.spawn.with_line_callback() to spawn a subprocess for the
-- command and call our callback whenever there's new stdout data.
-- Awesome handles this subprocess communication in a nonblocking
-- way so the rest of the UI stays responsive.
awful.spawn.with_line_callback(cmd, {
    stdout = function(line)
        -- This callback gets called whenever there's a new stdout line,
        -- so in our command's case, every new temperature sample.
        -- We do some simple string formatting on the value and update
        -- the widget's value. Note that tempwidget is a closure on
        -- the widget we instantiated earlier.
        tempwidget:set_markup(string.format(' CPU: %.0f°C ', tonumber(line)))
    end,
    stderr = function(line)
        -- Here we just post Awesome notifications if there's anything in stderr
        -- in case the sensors command writes some errors to stderr.
        naughty.notify({ text = "ERR:"..line})
    end,
})

-- I'm omitting a lot of other layout code that probably already exists in your
-- theme, but I'm assuming there's a layout for the right side of your taskbar
right_layout:add(tempwidget)

This all feels nicely Linuxly. I didn't have to spin up a new app with complicated GUI dependencies just to get a simple value that I could already get from command line.