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
• Getting Help
• Getting started
  • Dependencies
  • Building from source
  • Configuration
  • Running
• Community
• Contributors
• 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 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 Debian (unstable or testing), you can install polybar using sudo apt install polybar.
If you are using Debian (buster/stable), you need to enable backports and then install using sudo apt -t buster-backports install polybar.

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-<version>.tar for the version you want to build from the release page, extract it with tar xvf polybar-<version>.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

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 chat.freenode.net server.

Contributors

Owner

• Michael Carlberg @jaagr

Maintainers

• @NBonaparte
• Chase Geigle @skystrife
• Patrick Ziegler @patrick96

Logo Design by

• @Tobaloidee

All Contributors

License

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