Polybar

polybar is a fast and easy-to-use tool for creating status bars. It aims to be easily customizable, utilising many modules which enable a wide range of (editable) functionality, such as displaying workspaces, the date, or system volume. Polybar is especially useful for window managers that have a limited or non-existent status bar, such as awesome or i3. Polybar can also be used with desktop environments like Plasma.

Installation

Install the polybar package. The development version is polybar-git^AUR.

Configuration

Copy the configuration example from /etc/polybar/config.ini to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/polybar/config.ini. By default, polybar will load the config file from ~/.config/polybar/config.ini, /etc/xdg/polybar/config.ini, or /etc/polybar/config.ini depending on which it finds first.

Running Polybar

See polybar --help for a list of options to run it manually. However, you will probably want to run Polybar with your window manager's bootstrap routine. See #Running with a window manager.

Sample configuration

A very basic polybar configuration may look like this:

config.ini

[bar/mybar]
modules-right = date

[module/date]
type = internal/date
date = %Y-%m-%d%

It defines a bar named mybar with a module called date.

Polybar will also install the default configuration with many preconfigured modules in /etc/polybar/config.ini.

Running with a window manager

Create an executable file containing the startup logic, for example $HOME/.config/polybar/launch.sh:

#!/bin/bash

# Terminate already running bar instances
killall -q polybar
# If all your bars have ipc enabled, you can also use
# polybar-msg cmd quit

# Launch Polybar, using default config location ~/.config/polybar/config.ini
polybar mybar 2>&1 | tee -a /tmp/polybar.log & disown

echo "Polybar launched..."

This script will mean that restarting your window manager will also restart Polybar.

To execute this script by your window manager on startup, see Autostarting#On window manager startup.

Multiple monitors

If you wish to have your bar duplicated across multiple monitors, you need to launch multiple bars.

Add something like this to your startup script:

if type "xrandr"; then
  for m in $(xrandr --query | grep " connected" | cut -d" " -f1); do
    MONITOR=$m polybar --reload example &
  done
else
  polybar --reload example &
fi

Then configure Polybar to read the monitor from the environment:

config.ini

[bar/example]
monitor = ${env:MONITOR:}
[..]