wmbattery.gif Wmbattery displays the status of your laptop's battery in a small icon. This includes if it is plugged in, if the battery is charging, how many minutes of battery life remain, battery life remaining (with both a percentage and a graph), and battery status (high - green, low - yellow, or critical - red).

There's nothing in the program that makes it require WindowMaker, except maybe the look. It can be docked in WindowMaker or Afterstep's dock.

Wmbattery is based heavily on wmapm by Chris D. Faulhaber.

Wmapm is a nice program - why have I modified it into wmbattery? Here are some improvements in wmbattery:

  • Improved icon layout. I crammed the same information into less space while making the icon more elegant and visually pleasing (IMHO).
  • Easier to drag onto dock.
  • It consumes a little less memory.
  • Uses only 10 colors.
  • ACPI support, including multiple battery support and battery charging completion countdown timer.
  • HAL support.
  • Support for getting battery status from the sonypi driver instead of APM, for some Sony laptops that do not have apm support.
  • Can make its own estimatess of time remaining or time until full charge, even if APM does not.

wmbattery is available as a Debian package or in git (git://git.kitenet.net/wmbattery).

I posted some thoughts and history about wmbattery to my blog a while ago.

News

wmbattery 2.40 released with these changes

  • Add -s option which can be used to ignore fluctuations in reported battery charge (as seen on the EeePC) when using -e. Closes: #527870 (Joseph Huang)
Posted Saturday afternoon, May 9th, 2009

wmbattery 2.39 released with these changes

  • Use debhelper v7; rules file minimisation.
  • Depend on hal since /proc/acpi is gone from the default kernels now. Closes: #491099
Posted at midnight, July 22nd, 2008

wmbattery 2.38 released with these changes

  • Magic header file reordering to work around the disgusting linux-libc-dev/libc headers conflicts (#435700). Closes: #463811
Posted at teatime on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008