polybar: A C++ repository from novatech

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

Documentation | Installation | Support | Donate

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.

Introduction
Getting Help
Contributing
Getting started
Community
Contributors
Donations
- Sponsors
- Backers
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 and PulseAudio 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 Help

If you find yourself stuck, have a look at our Support page for resources where you can find help.

Contributing

Read our contributing guidelines for how to get started with contributing to polybar.

Getting started

Installation

Polybar is already available in the package manager for many repositories. We list some of the more prominent ones here. Also click the image on the right to see a more complete list of available polybar packages.

If you are using Debian (bullseye/11/stable) or later, you can install polybar using sudo apt install polybar. Newer releases of polybar are sometimes provided in the backports repository for stable users, you need to enable backports and then install using sudo apt -t buster-backports install polybar.

If you are using Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) or later, you can install polybar using sudo apt install polybar.

If you are using Arch Linux, you can install the AUR package polybar to get the latest version, or polybar-git for the most up-to-date (unstable) changes.

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 Tumbleweed, polybar is available from the official repositories and can be installed via zypper install polybar.

If you are using openSUSE Leap, polybar is available from OBS. The package is available for openSUSE Leap 15.1 and above.

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.

If you can't find your distro here, you will have to build from source.

Configuration

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

Install the example configuration

For a normal installation, polybar will install the example config to /usr/share/doc/polybar/config or /usr/local/share/doc/polybar/config (depending on your install parameters)

From there you can copy it to ~/.config/polybar/config to get started (make sure to backup any existing config file there).

Note: This example file is meant to showcase available modules and configuration options. Running it as-is will work but many modules will likely not start because they require machine-specific configuration and many of the font icons will not show up because they require a very specific font configuration. We encourage you to use it as a reference when building your own configuration.

Launch the example bar

$ polybar example

Running

See the wiki for details on how to run polybar.

Community

Want to get in touch?

Join our Gitter room at gitter.im/polybar/polybar
We have our own subreddit at r/polybar.
Chat with us in the #polybar IRC channel on the irc.libera.chat:6697 server.