[mpapi]

I started heading in this direction a few years ago, and now I'm running dwm (http://dwm.suckless.org), no menu bar, with a couple of scripts that I have to manually run to see things like the time or my unread email count. It did take some getting used to, but I'm definitely more productive this way.

[pyre]

Heh. I was just thinking about creating something similar and calling it 'status,' but apparently Ubuntu has gobbled up that very generic command name for upstart.