Yambar

This project is not developed anymore, and this repository will be archived in a near future.

I do not have neither the time nor the will to work on this anymore. Mainly because I do not use a bar myself anymore.

There are also technical difficulties, caused by the fact that yambar was initially X11, and only later was Wayland support added.

This means I have to maintain a backend (X11) I have not used myself in many years, as well as trying to work around technical limitations imposed by the way both X11 and Wayland is supported, As my own use of a bar has dwindled, the will to refactor and improve the backends has disappeared.

Yambar has seen a lot of contributions, for which I am very grateful. I hope that means someone is willing to pick up where I left of, and continue working on yambar. If not, we at least had a good run; the first commit was in late 2018, roughly 6½ years ago!

Index

1. Introduction
2. Configuration
3. Modules
4. Installation
5. Bugs

Introduction

yambar is a lightweight and configurable status panel (bar, for short) for X11 and Wayland, that goes to great lengths to be both CPU and battery efficient - polling is only done when absolutely necessary.

It has a number of modules that provide information in the form of tags. For example, the clock module has a date tag that contains the current date.

The modules do not know how to present the information though. This is instead done by particles. And the user, you, decides which particles (and thus how to present the data) to use.

Furthermore, each particle can have a decoration - a background color or a graphical underline, for example.

There is no support for images or icons. use an icon font (e.g. Font Awesome, or Material Icons) if you want a graphical representation.

There are a number of modules and particles builtin. More can be added as plugins. You can even write your own!

To summarize: a bar displays information provided by modules, using particles and decorations. How is configured by you.

Configuration

Yambar is configured using YAML, in ~/.config/yambar/config.yml. It must define a top-level dictionary named bar:

bar:
  height: 26
  location: top
  background: 000000ff

  right:
    - clock:
        content:
          - string: {text: , font: "Font Awesome 6 Free:style=solid:size=12"}
          - string: {text: "{date}", right-margin: 5}
          - string: {text: , font: "Font Awesome 6 Free:style=solid:size=12"}
          - string: {text: "{time}"}

For details, see the man pages (yambar(5) is a good start).

Example configurations can be found in examples.

Modules

Available modules:

• alsa
• backlight
• battery
• clock
• cpu
• disk-io
• dwl
• foreign-toplevel
• i3 (and Sway)
• label
• mem
• mpd
• network
• pipewire
• pulse
• removables
• river
• script (see script examples)
• sway-xkb
• xkb (XCB backend only)
• xwindow (XCB backend only)

Installation

To build, first, create a build directory, and switch to it:

mkdir -p bld/release && cd bld/release

Second, configure the build (if you intend to install it globally, you might also want --prefix=/usr):

meson setup --buildtype=release ../..

Optionally, explicitly disable a backend (or enable, if you want a configuration error if not all dependencies are met) by adding either -Dbackend-x11=disabled|enabled or -Dbackend-wayland=disabled|enabled to the meson command line.

Three, build it:

ninja

Optionally, install it:

ninja install

Bugs

Please report bugs to https://codeberg.org/dnkl/yambar/issues

The report should contain the following:

• Which Wayland compositor (and version) you are running
• Yambar version (yambar --version)
• Log output from yambar (start yambar from a terminal)
• If reporting a crash, please try to provide a bt full backtrace with symbols (i.e. use a debug build)
• Steps to reproduce. The more details the better