From personal experience, I can tell you that is can. The i3 window manager in Linux comes with a status bar program called i3bar. It also includes a program called i3status which constantly feeds i3bar information to display via JSON through a standard pipeline.<p>I wrote an i3status replacement that does exactly this. It sends JSON to STDOUT at a set time interval. i3bar takes the JSON as it comes through STDIN and changes the look of the bar as it&#x27;s read.