dzen

On Linux you can use progress¹ for many of these use cases. By default it scans for running processes that you might want to know about, but you can also ask it tell you about a PID with -p. It supports a -m[onitor] mode to report status until the command exits, and features some basic filtering options to ignore certain files. You can also manually dig about in /proc/$pid/fd{,info}/ if you want something more fancy, like using gdbar² to display a graphical progress through files for a given process. 1. https://github.com/Xfennec/progress 2. https://github.com/robm/dzen

You can have those with a window manager too, but in this case you need to do more fiddling I use xmonad with stalonetray [1] (which as you may guess from the name is a standalone notification tray) and dzen2 [2] as a notification area for basic information ( battery / cpu / temperature / wifi status ). With them I cover enough of my needs and I don't feel the need to anything more complex. I think that it would be nice to have some middle ground between a full desktop environment and bare-bone and manually configured window manager though. [1] http://stalonetray.sourceforge.net/ [2] https://github.com/robm/dzen

There's lots of these due to the plethora of minimalist tiling window managers demanding simple, scriptable info displays. I use dzen2: https://github.com/robm/dzen Xmobar is another popular one: http://projects.haskell.org/xmobar

Thank you! I am using Arch Linux with i3 (default config except for some keybindings) and running rxvt-unicode with tmux sessions. The top bar is a dzen2 dock with a custom script feeding it information. There is no real theme involved, but all the settings on display can be found at my GitHub account. https://www.archlinux.org http://www.i3wm.org http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/rxvt-unicode.html http://tmux.sourceforge.net/ https://github.com/robm/dzen https://github.com/daethorian/config