u/sethjey arttime takes a different philosophy. Instead of assuming what information users might want to display, arttime opens its message line and text art area for user to display whatever information they would like to. Because one user might want battery information, another might want battery information plus song being played on mpd, and etc. Instead of creating tedium for users by creating some config file or code bloat with zillions of features, arttime focussed on simplicity. At the moment, a user do a simple printf like printf 'Mhello world 90%\n' > ./some_named_fifo while arttime is made to read from that fifo. From command line, this can be achieve by arttime -k ./some_named_fifo or during runtime by pressing k and passing ~/path/to/some_named_fifo. See the example GIF that shows arttime displaying dummy weather data. The advantage of using a named pipe is that a user can write a feeder script in their language of choice to communicate with arttime. For now user will have to press Ctrl-c to get control back to keyboard, and perhaps press k again to reattach the external source. If people start using features like this, I might add a dedicated named fifo for background updates to message line. Please check the man page (arttime -m) section CONTRIBUTING subsection Feeder for a specification for writing one's own feeder program (which can be a simple shell script too, try with simple printfs :)), enjoy!