Customizing MOC to Perfection

Every month, I take a screenshot of my desktop and post it to the Arch Linux forums.

I included a shot of my music player of choice, MOC, in the background.  But after looking at it for a few seconds, I realized that I have spent months using this music player without giving it a proper color theme (looks really ugly, doesn’t it?).  Furthermore, the default keymap for MOC isn’t very Vim-friendly.

So, after a little work, I achieved some nice results.  First of all, I remapped a bunch of keys to make things a bit more comfortable for Vim users like myself.  Then, I set to work building a nice theme that would work well with my particular terminal colors (MOC only supports the 8 terminal colors).  The result is this:

Perhaps others might find my configuration useful.  So, I’ve included the config files below.  First of all, I should note that my terminal colors do not support the “standard notion” of what they should be, primarily because I chose to get rid of “cyan” and make that color a dark bluish color.  The terminal colors are almost identical to the dante.vim Vim colorscheme, a theme I encountered a while back (I’m currently using a modified version of lucius.vim as my colorscheme, but it is very similar).  Here they are:

Color    Regular Intense
------------------------
Black:   #1B1D1E #343737
Red:     #F92673 #FF5996
Green:   #86B413 #B8E354
Yellow:  #FDB436 #FEED6A
Blue:    #55C5D6 #8CEEFF
Magenta: #8952FE #9C6EFE
Teal:    #465457 #899CA1
Gray:    #CCCCC7 #FFFFFF

Foreground: #FFFFFF
Background: #000000 (semi-transparent)

Here’s a quick table showing the resulting colors:

Colorscheme and Keymap

If you have similar kinds of colors, you might be interested in the MOC theme.  Download the following file and drop it in ~/.moc/themes.  Then, you can also added into your config file as the default theme.

http://jwcxz.com/other/mocp/dante

And, here is the Vim-like keymap:

http://jwcxz.com/other/mocp/keymap

You can just drop this file in ~/.moc and then edit your config file to use this keymap file.

Global Keyboard Shortcuts and Remote Status Display

I chose MOC over MPD because of its nice lightweight footprint and tidy environment.  MOC actually supports remote operations so you can easily bind your keyboard’s media keys so that they control the player.  I also want to be able to display the current song and progress in my Conky setup (see screenshot).  It turns out that this is also pretty easy.  I have been using the following configuration for a while now:

First, to control MOC, I bound these commands to my media keys:

Play/Pause: [[ -z $(pidof mocp) ]] || mocp -G
Stop:         [[ -z $(pidof mocp) ]] || mocp -s
Next Track: [[ -z $(pidof mocp) ]] || mocp -f
Prev Track: [[ -z $(pidof mocp) ]] || mocp -r

And to display the current song information, I used the following lines in my .conkyrc

${if_running mocp}${alignc}${execi 10 mocp -Q '%song\n%artist\n%album'}
${execbar mocp -Q '%cs/%ts*100' | bc -l}${endif}

This will display the song, artist, and album each on their own lines.  Below that, it will display a progress bar.