polybar/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file. Each release should have the following subsections, if entries exist, in the given order: Breaking, Build, Deprecated, Removed, Added, Changed, Fixed, Security.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

Unreleased

Breaking

• custom/script:
  • now doesn't hide failing script if it's output is not changing (#2636). Somewhat similar behaviour can be imitated with format-fail, if necessary.
  • If the exec command produced no output and exited with a non-zero exit code the module is no longer completely empty, but just has an empty %output% token. If you relied on this behavior to hide the module under certain circumstances, make sure the script exits with an exit code of zero. (#2857, #2861)

Build

• Respect CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX when installing default config (#2770, #2917)
• Change default CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX to /usr. Installations with default flags will now go into /usr instead of /usr/local (#2917)
• Bump C++ version to C++17 (#2847)

Deprecated

• custom/text: The content setting and all its properties are deprecated in favor of format with the same functionality. (#2676)
• tray: All tray-related settings in the bar section are deprecated. They are replaced by the new tray module (#3002)
  • tray-position, tray-detached, tray-maxsize, tray-scale, tray-transparent, tray-background, tray-foreground, tray-padding, tray-offset-x, tray-offset-y

Added

• A tray module with type internal/tray for positioning the tray like a module
• Added support for TAG_LABEL (<label>) in ipc module (#2841) by @madhavpcm.
• Added support for format-i for each hook-i defined in ipc module (#2775, #2810) by @madhavpcm.
• internal/temperature: %temperature-k% token displays the temperature in kelvin (#2774, #2784)
• internal/pulseaudio: reverse-scroll option (#2664)
• custom/script: Repeat interval for script failure (interval-fail) and exec-if (interval-if) (#943, #2606, #2630)
• custom/text: Loads the format setting, which supports the <label> tag, if the deprecated content is not defined (#1331, #2673, #2676)
• internal/backlight:
  • scroll-interval option (#2696, #2700)
  • poll-interval setting controls how often the module is updated (in case it does not happen when the brightness changes) (#2835, #3028)
• internal/temperature: Added zone-type setting (#2572, #2752) by @xphoniex
• internal/xwindow: %class% and %instance% tokens, which show the contents of the WM_CLASS property of the active window (#2830)
• Added enable-struts option in bar section to enable/disable struts (#2769, #2844) by @VanillaViking.
• wm-restack:
  • bottom: lowers polybar to the bottom of the window stack (same as the previous behavior of generic) (#2961)
  • ewmh: Tries to use the _NET_SUPPORTING_WM_CHECK hint to position the bar (#2961)
• internal/xworkspaces: group-by-monitor setting to decide whether _NET_DESKTOP_VIEWPORT should be used to group workspaces by monitor; (#2603, #2926) by @slotThe.

Changed

• custom/script:
  • No longer produces a completely empty module if the exec command failed. It only produces an empty module if the script had a zero exit code. (#2857, #2861)
  • Bumped the script polling interval (not related to the interval setting) to decrease wakeups. Polybar may take slightly longer to shut down. #2879
• internal/fs: Use / as a fallback if no mountpoints are specified (#2572, #2705)
• internal/backlight:
  • Detect backlight if none specified (#2572, #2728)
  • use-actual-brightness now always defaults to true (even for amdgpu backlights) (#2835, 2839)
• Providing a negative min-width to a token adds right-padding (#2789, #2801) by @VanillaViking.
• Changed fuzzy match option on i3 and bspwm modules to find longest match instead of the first match (#2831, #2829) by @Ron0Studios.
• wm-restack
  • generic: Is now a best effort combination of other restacking strategies. First tries ewmh and then the bottom strategy (#2961)
  • bspwm: Will restack above the topmost bspwm root window instead of the root window associated with the monitor polybar is on (#3019)

Fixed

• Waiting for double click interval on modules that don't have a double click action (#2663, #2695)
• renderer:
  • Small gaps when rendering emojis (#2785, #2802)
  • Crash when using pseudo-transparency with certain wallpapers (#2798, #2813)
  • Crash when invalid UTF-8 text is encountered (#2091, #2958)
• config:
  • Error reporting for deprecated config values (#2724)
  • Also monitor include-files for changes when --reload is set (#675, #2759)
• internal/xwindow: module does not crash when a tag is not provided in format (#2826, #2833) by @VanillaViking
• internal/i3: module errors when i3 has negative gaps (#2888, #2889)
• internal/backlight: Fix module being one step behind every update (#2835, #3028)
• wm-restack = bspwm: bar may become unclickable if there are overlapping monitors (#2873, #2961)

3.6.3 - 2022-05-04

Fixed

• custom/script: Output clearing when exec-if fails (#2674)
• internal/battery: poll-interval not working (#2649, #2677)
• ipc: Polybar failing to open IPC channel after another user already ran polybar, if XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is not set (#2683, #2684)
• No overlines/underlines being drawn when using offsets (#2685)
• Update struts (_NET_WM_STRUT_PARTIAL) when hiding the bar (#2702)
• internal/pulseaudio: Hanging during startup (#2707, #2709)
• internal/xworkspaces: Updates of _NET_DESKTOP_VIEWPORT being ignored (#2693, #2698)

3.6.2 - 2022-04-03

Fixed

• format-offset being ignored (#2643)
• Negative struts (margin-bottom, margin-top) being ignored (#2642, #2644)
• Positioning in awesomeWM (#2651)
• internal/xworkspaces: The module sometimes crashed polybar when windows were closed. (#2655)
• Mouseover error when only one cursor is defined (#2656)
• custom/script: Timing inconsistencies (#2650, first described at #2630)

3.6.1 - 2022-03-05

Build

• Fixed compiler warning in Clang 13 (#2613)
• Fixed compiler error in GCC 12 (#2616, #2614)
• Fixed installation of docs when some are not generated (man, html...) (#2612)
• Fix LDFLAGS not being respected (#2619)

Fixed

• tray-offset-x, tray-offset-y, offset-x, and offset-y were mistakenly capped below at 0 (#2620)
• custom/script: Polybar shutdown being stalled by hanging script (#2621)
• polybar-msg: Wrong hint when using deprecated hook (#2624)

3.6.0 - 2022-03-01

Breaking

• We added the backslash escape character (\) for configuration values. This means that the literal backslash character now has special meaning in configuration files, therefore if you want to use it in a value as a literal backslash, you need to escape it with the backslash escape character. The parser logs an error if any unescaped backslashes are found in a value. This affects you only if you are using two consecutive backslashes in a config value, which will now be interpreted as a single literal backslash. (#2354)
• We rewrote our formatting tag parser. This shouldn't break anything, if you experience any problems, please let us know. The new parser now gives errors for certain invalid tags where the old parser would just silently ignore them. Adding extra text to the end of a valid tag now produces an error. For example, tags like %{T-a}, %{T2abc}, %{rfoo}, and others will now start producing errors. This does not affect you unless you are producing your own invalid formatting tags (for example in a script).
• For security reasons, the named pipe at /tmp/polybar_mqueue.<PID> had its permission bits changed from 666 to 600 to prevent sending ipc messages to polybar processes running under a different user.
• Also for security reasons, the polybar-msg command will now only send messages to polybar processes running under the same user. See the IPC documentation for what exactly this means.

Build

• New dependency: libuv. At least version 1.3 is required.
• Bump the minimum cmake version to 3.5
• The BUILD_IPC_MSG option has been renamed to BUILD_POLYBAR_MSG
• Building the documentation is now enabled by default and not just when sphinx-build is found.
• Users can control exactly which targets should be available with the following cmake options (together with their default value):
  • BUILD_POLYBAR=ON - Builds the polybar executable
  • BUILD_POLYBAR_MSG=ON - Builds the polybar-msg executable
  • BUILD_TESTS=OFF - Builds the test suite
  • BUILD_DOC=ON - Builds the documentation
  • BUILD_DOC_HTML=BUILD_DOC - Builds the html documentation (depends on BUILD_DOC)
  • BUILD_DOC_MAN=BUILD_DOC - Builds the manpages (depends on BUILD_DOC)
  • BUILD_CONFIG=ON - Generates the default config
  • BUILD_SHELL=ON - Generates shell completion files
  • DISABLE_ALL=OFF - Disables all above targets by default. Individual targets can still be enabled explicitly.
• The documentation can no longer be built by directly configuring the doc directory.
• The POLYBAR_FLAGS cmake variable can be used to pass extra C++ compiler flags.
• The sample config file has been removed.
• Polybar now ships a default config that is installed to /etc/polybar/config.ini, it lives in doc/config.ini. It will also be placed in the examples directory in the documentation folder. (#2405)
• The userconfig target has been removed, you can no longer use make userconfig. As an alternative, you can copy the default config from /etc/polybar/config.ini.
• The DEBUG_SHADED cmake variable and its associated functionality has been removed.

Deprecated

• [settings]: throttle-output and throttle-output-for have been removed. The new event loop already does a similar thing where it coalesces update triggers if they happen directly after one another, leading to only a single bar update.
• When not specifying the config file with --config, naming your config file config is deprecated. Rename your config file to config.ini.
• Directly writing ipc messages to /tmp/polybar_mqueue.<PID> is deprecated, users should always use polybar-msg. As a consequence the message format used for IPC is deprecated as well.
• polybar-msg hook is deprecated in favor of using the hook action. polybar-msg will tell you the correct command to use.

Added

• Support px and pt units everyhwere where before only a number of spaces or pixels could be specified. (#2578, #1651, #951)
• internal/alsa: Right and middle click settings. (#2566, #2573)
• internal/network:
  • New token %mac% shows MAC address of selected interface (#2568, #2569)
  • New token %netspeed% that provides the total speed of the internet (up + down speed) (#2590, #1083)
  • speed-unit = B/s can be used to customize how network speeds are displayed. (#2068)
  • interface-type may be used in place of interface to automatically select a network interface (#2025, #339)
• Polybar can now read config files from stdin: polybar -c /dev/stdin. (#2545)
• custom/script:
  • Setting environment variables using env-* config option. (#2090, #2512)
  • Add formatting for script failure (format-fail, label-fail) (#2588, #2596)
• Support for ramp weights. (#1750, #2505)
• internal/memory: New tokens %used%, %free%, %total%, %swap_total%, %swap_free%, and %swap_used% that automatically switch between MiB and GiB when below or above 1GiB. (#2472, #2488)
• internal/i3: show-urgent option to always show urgent windows when pin-workspace is active (#2374, #2378)
• internal/xworkspaces:
  • reverse-scroll can be used to reverse the scroll direction when cycling through desktops. (#2365)
  • %nwin% can be used to display the number of open windows per workspace (#604, #2329)
• Initial support for the backslash escape character (\) in configs. (#2354, #2361)
• Warn states for the cpu, memory, fs, and battery modules. (#570, #956, #1871, #2141, #2199)
  • internal/battery: format-low, label-low, animation-low, low-at = 10.
  • internal/cpu: format-warn, label-warn, warn-percentage = 80
  • internal/fs: format-warn, label-warn, warn-percentage = 90
  • internal/memory: format-warn, label-warn, warn-percentage = 90
• radius now affects the bar border as well (#1566, #2359)
• Per-corner radius with radius-{bottom,top}-{left,right} (#2294, #2297)
• internal/xkeyboard:
  • %variant% token to display the keyboard layout variant (#316, #2163)
  • Allow matching of variants in layout-icon (#2414, #2521)
• Config option to hide a certain module (hidden = false) (#2108, #2342)
• Actions to control visibility of modules (module_toggle, module_show, and module_hide) (#2108, #2426)
• internal/backlight: use-actual-brightness option to use the actual_brightness file to get the brightness (#2380)
• wm-restack = generic option that lowers polybar to the bottom of the window stack. Fixes the issue where the bar is being drawn on top of fullscreen windows in xmonad. (#2205, #2404)
• internal/bspwm: occupied-scroll = true option allows scrolling through occupied desktops only. (#2427, #2428)
• custom/ipc:
  • send action to send arbitrary strings to be displayed in the module. (#2455, #2463)
  • hook, next, prev, reset actions to control the module through actions instead of the deprecated hook messages (#2464, #2528)
• Added double-click-interval setting to the bar section to control the time interval in which a double-click is recognized. Defaults to 400 (ms) (#1441, #2510)
• Added a new tray-foreground setting to give hints to tray icons about what color they should be. (#2235, #2552)
• polybar-msg:
  • For module actions, you can now also specify the module name, action name, and optional data as separate arguments. (#2539)
  • Added man page: man 1 polybar-msg (#2539)

Changed

• Polybar now also reads config.ini when searching for config files. (#2323, #2324)
• Polybar additionally searches in XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/polybar/config.ini (or /etc/xdg/polybar/config.ini if it is not set) and /etc/polybar/config.ini for config files. (#2016, #2511)
• We rewrote polybar's main event loop. This shouldn't change any behavior for the user, but be on the lookout for X events, click events, or ipc messages not arriving and the bar not shutting down/restarting properly and let us know if you find any issues. (#2384)
• Slight changes to the value ranges the different ramp levels are responsible for in the cpu, memory, fs, and battery modules. The first level is used for everything at and below the start of the value range and the last level for everything at and above the end of the value range. The other levels are evenly distributed over the value range as before. The value range is bounded by the new warning thresholds. (#2199)
• custom/script: interval now defaults to 0 if tail = true as per the documentation. (#2240)
• internal/network: Increased precision for upload and download speeds: 0 decimal places for KB/s (as before), 1 for MB/s and 2 for GB/s. (#2054)
• Clicks arriving in close succession, no longer get dropped. Before polybar would drop any click that arrived within 5ms of the previous one. (#2510)
• Increased the double click interval from 150ms to 400ms. (#2510)
• Stop ignoring actions if they arrive while the previous one hasn't been processed yet. (#2469, #2517)
• Polybar can now be run without passing the bar name as argument given that the configuration file only defines one bar (#2525, #2526)
• include-directory and include-file now support relative paths. The paths are relative to the folder of the file where those directives appear. (#2523, #2535)
• custom/ipc: Empty output strings are no longer formatted. This prevents extraneous spaces and separators from appearing in the bar when the output of an ipc module is empty. (#2549)

Fixed

• Broken positioning in Openbox when the bar is hidden and shown again (#2021, #2600)
• Handling of action blocks that contain negative offsets (#1814, #2601)
• polybar -m used to show both physical outputs and RandR monitors, even if the outputs were covered by monitors. (#2481, #2485)
• Parser error if click command contained } (#2040, #2303)
• Some modules stop updating when system time moves backwards. (#857, #1932, #2559)
• custom/script: Concurrency issues with fast-updating tailed scripts. (#1978, #2518)
• internal/alsa: Slight imprecision when calculating percentages. This caused the volume reported to be off by one. (#2399, #2401)
• internal/backlight: With amdgpu backlights, the brightness indicator was slightly behind. (#2367, #2380)
• internal/bspwm: Warning message regarding T@ (#2371, #2439)
• internal/xkeyboard: Trailing space after the layout label when indicators are empty and made sure right amount of spacing is added between the indicator labels (#2292, #2306)
• internal/xworkspaces:
  • Broken scroll-wrapping and order of workspaces when scrolling (#2491, #2492)
  • Module would error if WM was not full started up. (#1915, #2429)
  • Make the urgent hint persistent (#1081, #2340)
  • Crash when the WM sets -1 for _NET_WM_DESKTOP (#2352, #2353)
• internal/network: The module now properly supports 'altnames' for interfaces. (#2540)
• internal/battery: More accurate battery state (#2563, #2556)
• Offset tag does not respect current background color (#2578, #1700)
• Crash when negative margin or padding was specified (#2578, #1265)

3.5.7 - 2021-09-21

Fixed

• The tray mistakenly removed tray icons that did not support XEMBED (#2479, #2442)
• custom/ipc: Only the first appearance of the %pid% token was replaced (#2500)

3.5.6 - 2021-05-24

Build

• Support building documentation on sphinx 4.0 (#2424)

Fixed

• Tray icons sometimes appears outside of bar (#2430, #1679)
• Crash in the i3 module (#2416)

3.5.5 - 2021-03-01

Build

• Support older python sphinx versions again (#2356)

3.5.4 - 2021-01-07

Fixed

• Wrong text displayed if module text ends with } (#2331)

3.5.3 - 2020-12-23

Build

• Don't use git when building documentation (#2309)

Fixed

• Empty color values are no longer treated as invalid and no longer produce an error.