name attribute of an i3bar block is not unique

Bug Report

subj

Summary

Affected module: output.py

Description:

I had a look at the output of bumblebee-status (don’t ask me why, but for now I’ll just say that the reason was a bit more than just hypothetical) and I believe I spotted a place where it is not compliant to the i3bar protocol specification.

Quote from https://i3wm.org/docs/i3bar-protocol.html :

name and instance

Every block should have a unique name (string) entry so that it can be easily identified in scripts which process the output. i3bar completely ignores the name and instance fields. Make sure to also specify an instance (string) entry where appropriate. For example, the user can have multiple disk space blocks for multiple mount points.

First of all, there’s no instance attribute anywhere (in master branch, but there is in development branch). I’m not sure this part is a problem at all for the master branch, while bumblebee-status can use a generic module like spacer, the naming uniqueness is achieved through aliases.

The problem with the name attribute seems to be a real one. For example, a module with multiple widgets (think mpd) for example, will produce multiple blocks with same “mpd” name. Indeed, I can see

"name": module.id,

in output.py. And development branch seems to be suffering from same defect, it uses

"name": module.id(),

So every mpd related block for every prefix/suffix/full_text part of each mpd widget is named “mpd”.

This is very misleading for exactly the reason stated in the i3bar docs that I quoted above. Can we please get unique names like MODULENAME.WIDGETNAME/ID.PREFIX/FULL_TEXT/SUFFIX everywhere (in both master and development branches)? If possible, in master branch first.

[ghost]

Icon support for the dzen2 bridge has been added and documented.

Thanks for your help @tobi-wan-kenobi

[ghost]

The dwm bridge has a brother now. It lives at https://github.com/somospocos/bumblebee-bridge-dzen2

It is already functional, but I am planning to try adding support for mouse events to this one, as well as support for transparently replacing prefixes with image icons, because dzen2 supports a couple of simple image formats.