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:
You can find polybar configs for these example images (and other configs) here.
If you need help, check out the Support page.
Please report any bugs you find by creating an issue ticket here on GitHub.
Make sure you include steps on how to reproduce it.
Table of Contents
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...
Getting Help
If you find yourself stuck, have a look at our Support page for resources where you can find help.
Getting started
Polybar was already packaged for the distros listed below.
If you can't find your distro here, you will have to build from source.
If you create a package for any other distribution, please consider contributing the template.
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 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 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.
If you are using openSUSE, polybar is available from OBS repository. Package is available for openSUSE Leap 15 and Tumbleweed.
If you are using FreeBSD, polybar can be installed using pkg install polybar. Make sure you are using the latest package branch.
If you are using Gentoo, both release and git-master versions are available in the main repository.
If you are using Fedora, you can install polybar using sudo dnf install polybar.
Dependencies
A compiler with C++14 support (clang-3.4+, gcc-5.1+), cmake 3.1+, git
cairo
libxcb
python
xcb-proto
xcb-util-image
xcb-util-wm
Optional dependencies:
xcb-util-cursor required for the cursor-click and cursor-scroll settings
xcb-util-xrm required for accessing X resources with ${xrdb:...}
Optional dependencies for extended module support:
xcb-xkb required by internal/xkeyboard
alsa-lib required by internal/alsa
libpulse required by internal/pulseaudio
i3-wm required by internal/i3
jsoncpp required by internal/i3
libmpdclient required by internal/mpd
libcurl required by internal/github
libnl-genl or 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.
Download the polybar-.tar for the version you want to build from the
release page, extract it with
tar xvf polybar-.tar and go into the extracted folder. There, run
the following commands:
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make -j$(nproc)
$ sudo make install
There's also a helper script available in the root folder:
$ ./build.sh
For more info, have a look at the Compiling wiki page.
Configuration
Details on how to setup and configure the bar and each module have been moved to the wiki.
Install the example configuration
Run the following inside the build directory:
$ make userconfig
Or you can copy the example config from /usr/share/doc/polybar/config or /usr/local/share/doc/polybar/config (depending on your install parameters)
Launch the example bar
$ polybar example
Running
Community
Want to get in touch?
We have our own subreddit at r/polybar.
Chat with us in the #polybar IRC channel on the chat.freenode.net server.
Contributors
Owner
Michael Carlberg @jaagr
Maintainers
Logo Design by
License
Polybar is licensed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for more information.