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tmux-plugins / tmux-battery

Plug and play battery percentage and icon indicator for Tmux.
MIT License
503 stars 98 forks source link

Importance of battery icons #43

Closed martinbeentjes closed 7 years ago

martinbeentjes commented 8 years ago

Hey! Thanks for using the plugin, I am currently planning out some future works for this. I would like to receive your feedback on this.

I became the maintainer for this plugins after some contributions to get the plugin working when upgrading to macOS Sierra (pmset -g batt output format changed). Thanks to you, we now support ChromeOS. It is also possible to add a changing background color based on the battery percentage.

But, one of the functionalities is adding emoji characters (two byte unicode characters) based on the status (charging/discharging et cetera). However, I encountered multiple issues regarding this problem. And I have been thinking of the importance of this functionality.

As this is an enhancement to the tmux status bar, I prefer not to use emoji characters. So, personally I do not prefer to use it.

With this issue, I want to know what you prefer. Should we keep the battery icon, or is it something we could get rid of?

forkjoseph commented 8 years ago

Emoji support is super awesome! and should keep the battery icon. However, ChromeOS does not support emoji somehow (yes, it needs more debugging), and I could not use the emoji on my laptop :(

Could some other chromebook users confirm this??

rlue commented 7 years ago

Emojis are important to me in that they are an immediately obvious, non-verbal status indicator — it reduces the cognitive load of interpreting their meaning (compared to "charging" vs. "discharging" vs. "charged"). If their functionality could be substituted with something similar, I wouldn't mind having them replaced.

For example, text color would work, but that's already used to indicate current charge state (and is more intuitive for that purpose anyway). Sorry I don't have any better suggestions.

EDIT: Actually, I just noticed that my terminal has issues with displaying double-width characters in the tmux status bar, where the text will get shifted over one character to the left and the rightmost character will get duplicated at the end, like so:

rlue::liberte 0:vim*                                      work 🔋 ~1:22 Thu 24 Aug 12:588

And I don't really care enough to hunt down a solution to this problem. If emojis present problems like these, I could take them or leave them.