I've been using Polybar for a while, with a relatively default-looking setup:

I'm not extremely happy with that setup for a couple of reasons:

• The icon font polybar uses by default, Wuncon Siji, is a bitmap font and doesn't work nicely with high DPI.
  
• Its widgets aren't really interactive; it would've been useful to have a widget which I can use to adjust volume or brightness with my touch screen.
  
• The i3wm integration doesn't work exactly as I would like it to.
  

I've started a project, called webbar, which is a webkit-based status bar with widgets written in javascript (using Preact). It's not done yet, but it's not that far off:

What's missing for me to switch over to it as my main bar is mainly:

• A widget which connects to i3wm's socket and shows information about workspaces
  
• A volume widget and a backlight brightness widget
  
• Better multi-monitor support
  

My laptop is one of those 2-in-1 laptops, so there are times when I don't have a keyboard in front of me if I'm doing web browsing or watching videos or whatever. That makes it useful to be able to change volume and backlight brightness by just dragging a slider on the screen. The most obvious place to put such sliders would be the status bar, because that's always visible anyways.

As for the information I like to keep in my bar:

• Since I'm on a laptop, often on battery, it's useful to know what my CPU usage is. If it's suspiciously high, I can find whatever firefox tab is using a lot of power and make sure to close it.
  
• Again, since I'm on a laptop, it's useful to see what WiFi network I'm connected to; the laptop might connect to some shitty wifi network in the area instead of a decent one.
  
• For obvious reasons, it's useful to have the battery level and date/time readily available.
  
• Seeing the volume level is useful, mostly to make sure it's muted whenever I'm in a situation where making sound would be undesirable.
  

My widgets look like this, which I think is fairly neat: https://github.com/mortie/webbar/blob/ma...widgets.js

For notifications, I use dunst, but I don't have any cool scripts which notify me. I should probably make one which checks my battery level and notifies me when it gets low.