**slstatus** is a suckless and lightweight status monitor for window managers that use WM_NAME as statusbar (e.g. DWM). It is written in pure C without any system calls and only reads from files most of the time. It is meant to be a better alternative to Bash scripts (inefficient) and Conky (bloated for this use).
If you write a bash script that shows system information in WM_NAME, it executes a huge amount of external commands (top, free etc.) every few seconds. This results in high system resource usage. slstatus solves this problem by only using C libraries and/or reading from files in sysfs/procfs.
Looking at the LOC (lines of code) of the [Conky project](https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky), very interesting: *28.346 lines C++, 219 lines Python and 110 lines Lua*. slstatus currently has about **800 lines of clean documented C code** and even includes additional possibilities as it can be customized and extended very easily. Configure it by customizing the config.h (C header file) which is secure and fast as no config files are parsed at runtime.
Before you continue, please be sure that a C compiler (preferrably gcc), GNU make and `alsa-lib` (for volume percentage) are installed. Then copy config.def.h to config.h and customize it to fit your needs. Recompile and install it after modifications:
