Polybar

A fast and easy-to-use tool for creating status bars.

Polybar aims to help users build beautiful and highly customizable status bars for their desktop environment, without the need of having a black belt in shell scripting. Here are a few screenshots showing you what it can look like:

If you need help, check out the Support page.

Please report any issues or bugs you may find by creating an issue ticket here on GitHub. Make sure you include steps on how to reproduce it. There's also an irc channel available at freenode, cleverly named #polybar.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Getting started
  • Dependencies
  • Building from source
  • Configuration
  • Running
• License

Introduction

The main purpose of Polybar is to help users create awesome status bars. It has built-in functionality to display information about the most commonly used services. Some of the services included so far:

• Systray icons
• Window title
• Playback controls and status display for MPD using libmpdclient
• ALSA volume controls
• Workspace and desktop panel for bspwm and i3
• Workspace module for EWMH compliant window managers
• Keyboard layout and indicator status
• CPU and memory load indicator
• Battery display
• Network connection details
• Backlight level
• Date and time label
• Time-based shell script execution
• Command output tailing
• User-defined menu tree
• Inter-process messaging
• And more...

See the wiki for more details.

Getting started

If you are using Arch Linux, you can install the AUR package polybar-git to get the latest version, or polybar for the latest stable release. If you create a package for any other distribution, please consider contributing the template.

If you are using Void Linux, you can install polybar using xbps-install -S polybar.

If you are using NixOS, polybar is available in both the stable and unstable channels and can be installed with the command nix-env -iA nixos.polybar.

If you are using Debian, polybar is available from the GetDeb repository.

If you are using Slackware, polybar is available from the SlackBuilds repository.

If you are using Source Mage GNU/Linux, polybar spell is available in test grimoire and can be installed via cast polybar.

Dependencies

A compiler with C++14 support (clang-3.4+, gcc-5.1+).

• cairo
• libxcb
• python2
• xcb-proto
• xcb-util-image
• xcb-util-wm
• xcb-util-xrm

Optional dependencies:

• xcb-util-cursor required for the cursor-click and cursor-scroll settings

Optional dependencies for extended module support:

• alsa-lib required by internal/alsa
• libpulse required by internal/pulseaudio
• jsoncpp required by internal/i3
• libmpdclient required by internal/mpd
• libcurl required by internal/github
• wireless_tools required by internal/network

Find a more complete list on the dedicated wiki page.

Building from source

Please report any problems you run into when building the project.

$ git clone --branch 3.1.0 --recursive https://github.com/jaagr/polybar
$ mkdir polybar/build
$ cd polybar/build
$ cmake ..
$ sudo make install

There's also a helper script available in the root folder:

$ ./build.sh

Configuration

Details on how to setup and configure the bar and each module have been moved to the wiki.

Install the example configuration

$ make userconfig

Launch the example bar

$ polybar example

Running

See the wiki for details on how to run polybar.

License

Polybar is licensed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for more information.