You may or may not have heard about Lemonbar. It's customizble and lightweight, but becomes pretty tricky on bigger scale. You'll end up wrapping long strings of text in %{#FF000FFF}%{F-} & %{A:ncmpcpp:}%{A} and eventually have unmaintainable long strings. That's not intended nor pleasant.

That's where I decided to make Captain. Captain is a Lemonbar wrapper almost entirely written in bash. It tries to make the annoying things (seperate scripts, eventual layout, mouse events, colors) a lot easier by using a single file for maintaining it. Captain is split up in 3 sections.

• The captain daemon starting the display.
• The captin.d(irectory) containing seperate scripts to display content
• The captainrc file managing the visual aspects.

You can read more about these in their seperate sections.

• captain
• captain.d
• captainrc

You first of all will need to clone the files. I highly recommend using the command line for this:

$ git clone https://github.com/muse/Captain

You'll now have all the files locally in a folder named Captain and can start the deamon by running the captain executable in there. Make sure to set +x to the captain executable and atleast +r to the captain.d scripts.

You want to move the files to their according locations.

• captain -> $PATH # Anywhere where it is availabe in your PATH.
• captain.d -> ~/.config/captain/captain.d
• captainrc -> ~/.config/captain/captainrc

You then want to add captain to the bottom of your starting rc. This could be bspwmrc in my instance, or xinitrc in others. That is all there needs to be done, restart and start customizing from here on.

• Lemonbar (Lemonbar-xft also works and is recommended)
• Bash 4.*.*
• Python 3.*.*
• Git 2.*.* (Only required when cloning the files, lower version might also work)