perspektiv

perspektiv (engl. spotting scope) is designed to be a lightweight userland daemon for graphically reporting system events such as monitor brightness changes, audio volume changes etc.

I created perspektiv to go hand in hand with the hotkey setup on my laptop: I wanted something that fits well with the graphical theme of my system, was lightweight to comfortably have running as a daemon in the background, and was hackable enough to easily add functionality as I desired.

However, this means that perspektiv only has stuff that I myself cared about enough to implement. Currently, that's just the following:

• Monitor brightness with X11/RandR
• Audio volume/mute with ALSA

There's also the feature/rfkill branch with a proof-of-concept for an rfkill module, i.e. for stuff like

• Bluetooth toggle
• Wifi toggle

If there are any additional things that you would like to have, you can easily implement them yourself! See the contributing guide for more information and hopefully enough documentation to get you started.

perspektiv has been tested on Arch Linux. Your milage might vary on other distrubutions, although I believe that the core of perspektiv should work regardless of what platform you're on (as long as you're using linux).

Installation

Dependencies

Icons are currently based on Font Awesome 4.7.0. Some distributions have a package for Font Awesome:

If your distro is not listed, it might still have a package that I simply don't know about. Else, you can just download the OTF or TTF file (in the zip file as fonts/FontAwesome.otf or fonts/FontAwesome-webfont.ttf) and drop it into your fonts directory (probably something like /usr/share/fonts/<TTF or OTF>). If you're not sure whether to use the OTF or TTF file, go with the OTF file.

Prebuilt Binaries

For x86_64, prebuilt binaries are available in the gh-pages branch:

git clone https://github.com/henriklaxhuber/perspektiv && cd perspektiv
git checkout gh-pages

Choose the binary that includes the modules you wish to run.

Building from Source

1. Build Dependencies:

   • Get a stable rust compiler from rustup
   • Install GTK+3 shared libraries and development files (libgtk-3-dev on ubuntu)
   • Install libc6 dev library (libc6-dev on ubuntu)
   • For the x11_backlight module, install libxrandr-dev (ubuntu) or your distro's equivalent
   • For the alsa_volume module, install libasound2-dev (ubuntu) or your distro's equivalent

2. Building:

   git clone https://github.com/henriklaxhuber/perspektiv && cd perspektiv
   cargo build --release --features "feature_list"

where feature_list is a space-separated list of the modules that you would like to include. You can pick from the following modules:

• x11_backlight: Show a popup with the monitor brightness when it is changed
• alsa_volume: Show a popup with the current volume or mute status when they are changed
• (PoC) rfkill: Any rfkill block/unblock event. Support is experimental; you need to checkout the branch feature/rfkill to build the module.

The binary will be created as ./target/release/perspektiv.

Final Steps

Drop the binary file into your $PATH somewhere (for a system-wide installation, something like /bin will probaly work well). You must still configure your display manager to start perspektiv once you log in! Make sure you don't run perspektiv as root.

Note that runnning perspektiv for the first time will create a default configuration file under ~/.config/perspektiv.

Configuration

perspektiv aims to be heavily customizable so that it fits on any system with any design. This is partially achieved by using GTK to integrate well with the system theme. But not everything can be done with CSS, and not every GTK theme works well for perspektiv. This is why you have the toml configuration file at your disposal, where you can:

• Set custom CSS files
• Change dimensions such as width, padding, margins, and more
• Change how information is presented

See the default configuration file for more information on how to do that.