that's awesome! do you reckon the pr is going to get accepted? I definitely remember reading discussions of this issue in the past and seeing a firm "we don't want this feature in i3" response.

The PR is coming from one of the core maintainers, so yes, it will be accepted.

It doesn't just implement this specific feature, though. It provides a more general approach for i3bar that enables this and many other use cases. This struck us as a good and flexible solution we can get behind.