I find the status area very useful - I've got a lua script feeding dwm stdin via fifo and showing me a handy summary [1] of the things I often want to know [2]. Sometimes there are things I really want to be reminded of, but which don't deserve a whole window of their own.
What I'd like for this is the option to have part of the status area coloured (in red, for example). A sufficient solution for me would be if the stdin text was split based upon some defined separator character (eg. '^') - everything before the ^ (or if there is no ^) gets displayed normally, everything after the ^ gets the red highlight. This sounds simple enough to me that I could code it myself if no-one else is keen, but useful enough for highlighting occasional/important notifications. Karl. [1] - I used to use conky, but it was way too resource-hungry for a simple textual display, and it didn't offer the options I wanted. My current display shows like this: "u7 r16 s0 n0/0 1 Fri 8:25" where u=cpu usage, r=ram usage, s=swap usage, n=network bitrates. If I have any flash drives mounted then I see something like this: "u3 r16 s0 n0/0 1 Fri 8:26 uf3" where uf3 is the name of the drive - I like to be reminded of these mounts so that I don't accidentally pull out a mounted drive. I only mount removable drives for as long as I need to and then unmount them straight away, so I'd like that section to be in red. [2] - I should probably disable the ram display when it's less than, say, 75%, and the swap when it's less than 1% - those are normal situations and it's just not useful to know about. If anyone wants the lua script, send me an email.
