Customize Manjaro's status bar

Theory

So, the first thing we need to remember well is that Manjaro by default uses something called powerlevel10k. This is a Zsh theme. It’s supposed to be fast, highly customizable prompt theme.

And by running something like: p10k configure, we can get a comprehensive configuration wizard that gives tons of options when it comes to configuring the prompt as we see fit. This does a lot of magic in the backend of course, but I used it to add a time section to the status bar, and it did it for me easily. You can of course go crazy with it but for me it was more than enough.

Dotfiles

So, by running p10k configure under the hood a file is created at ~/.p10k.zsh, and in here you can go and edit lines if you want to further fine tune the status bar’s look and feel. I did a slight correction to the wizard setup and that is that I didn’t want two lines for the status bar so I literally edited this section:

  typeset -g POWERLEVEL9K_LEFT_PROMPT_ELEMENTS=(
    # =========================[ Line #1 ]=========================
    # os_icon               # os identifier
    dir                     # current directory
    vcs                     # git status
    # =========================[ Line #2 ]=========================
    prompt_char             # prompt symbol
  )

On the comment that says [ LINE #2 ], there used to be a \n, I simply deleted that and the status bar was one line and I was happy.

Comment: It’s pretty useful to have these auto-generated files but with tons of comments to help you navigate them more easily.

Conclusion

And, now, of course, this dotfile should be versioned controlled and added to a repo so that this configuration is easily repeatable in whatever other machine we want, and so that we don’t lose it. Yeah, automation, pretty cool.

Sources

• Manjaro’s Forums