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. Heres a few screenshots showing you what it can look like:

Please note that the project still is in early development, so please report any problems by creating an issue ticket.

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 generate content for the most commonly used widgets, such as:

• Window title
• Playback controls and status display for MPD using libmpdclient
• ALSA volume controls
• Workspace and desktop panel for bspwm and i3
• 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 are using Void Linux you can install the package polybar available in the official xbps repository.

If you create a package for any other distribution, please consider contributing the template.

Dependencies

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

• cmake
• boost
• xcb-util-wm
• xcb-util-image
• libXft
• python2

Optional dependencies for module support:

• jsoncpp (required by internal/i3)
  • Because some distributions only offer pre-historic releases of jsoncpp, a local copy of the library source (jsoncpp-1.7.7) will be built and linked statically as a fallback if a valid version is not found.
• wireless_tools (required by internal/network)
• alsa-lib (required by internal/volume)
• libmpdclient (required by internal/mpd)

$ pacman -S cmake python2 boost xcb-util-image xcb-util-wm libxft wireless_tools alsa-lib libmpdclient
$ apt-get install cmake cmake-data libboost-dev libfreetype6-dev libxcb1-dev libx11-xcb-dev libxcb-util0-dev libxcb-image0-dev libxcb-randr0-dev libxcb-ewmh-dev libxcb-icccm4-dev libxcb-xkb-dev xcb-proto python-xcbgen i3-wm libiw-dev libasound2-dev libmpdclient-dev

Building from source

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

$ git clone --branch 2.3.9 --recursive https://github.com/jaagr/polybar
$ mkdir polybar/build
$ cd polybar/build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
$ 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

NOTE: If the bar output looks odd, it's probably because you're missing the fonts defined in the config. Update the config or install the missing fonts.

Running

See the wiki for details on how to run polybar.

License

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