wmbattery displays the status of your laptop's battery in a small icon. This
includes if it is plugged in, if the battery is charging, how many minutes
of battery life remain, battery life remaining (with both a percentage and a
graph), and battery status (high - green, low - yellow, or critical - red).
wmbattery is based on wmapm by Chris D. Faulhaber <jedgar@speck.ml.org>
-- see the copyright file for more information.
wmapm is a nice program - why have I modified it into wmbattery? Here are
some improvements in wmbattery:
- Improved icon layout. I crammed the same information into less space
while making the icon more elegant and visually pleasing (IMHO).
- Easier to drag onto dock.
- It consumes a little less memory.
- Uses only 10 colors.
- You can run in on a different display via -d (broken in wmapm).
- Support for getting battery status from the sonypi driver instead of APM,
for some Sony laptops that do not have apm support.
- ACPI support, including multiple battery support and battery charging
completion countdown timer.
- HAL support.
- upower support.
- Can make its own estimatess of time remaining or time until full
charge, even if APM does not.
Conversely, here are some reasons to stick with wmapm:
- You like its look.
- It has a neat rainbow-colored progress bar.
- It has buttons to suspend the laptop and stuff.
- It may be more actively and/or better maintained. Or not.
Decide for yourself.
Still, forking is evil, and if I was doing this all over again, I suppose
I'd try to add theme support to wmamn so it could morph into wmbattery with
a theme. Oh well.
The homepage for wmbattery is <http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/wmbattery/>
-- Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>
