Weather info in i3status

I recently started using i3wm because it is light-weight, keyboard-friendly and uses the screen real-estate efficiently.  I customized i3bar and i3status (which came installed with i3) to show system information and date/time. But there was no out-of-the-box feature to get weather information from i3 status.

I wanted a simple solution that does not require installing an external program like i3blocks, conky, dzen2, xmobar or lemonbar. It had to also preserve colors I had configured for the i3bar output. So I came up with this simple solution.

Step 1: Setup a cron job to retrieve weather information every half hour and store it in a temporary file.

*/5 * * * * curl -s wttr.in/montreal?T | head -n 7 > ~/.weather.cache

Step 2: Write a shell script to add this information to i3status data.

 #!/bin/sh
# shell script to prepend i3status with weather
i3status | (read line && echo "$line" && read line && echo "$line" && read line && echo "$line" && while :
do
  read line
  temp=$(cat ~/.weather.cache | grep -m 1 -Eo -e '-?[[:digit:]].*°C')
  status=$(cat ~/.weather.cache | head -n 3 | tail -n 1 | cut -c 16-)
  echo ",[{\"full_text\":\"${temp} ? ${status}\",\"color\":\"#00FF00\" },${line#,\[}" || exit 1
done)

Step 3: The~/.config/i3/config file needs to be updated for thestatus_command to pipe through this script, as follows.

bar {
status_command .config/i3/weather.sh
tray_output primary
}

Step 4: The~/.i3status.conf file should also be updated to change the output to the JSON format.

general {
output_format = "i3bar"
colors = true
interval = 5
}

You can find more information from the following links.

• https://i3wm.org/i3status/manpage.html
• https://github.com/i3/i3status/tree/master/contrib
• https://i3wm.org/docs/i3bar-protocol.html
• https://github.com/smxi/inxi