README

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.

!default configuration screenshot

 Table of Contents

 Introduction
 Getting Help
 Contributing
 Getting started
   Installation
   First Steps
 Community
 Contributors
 Donations
   Sponsors
   Backers
 License
 Signatures

 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 bullseye-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
polybar to get the
latest stable release using sudo pacman -S polybar. The latest unstable
changes are also available in the
polybar-git package in the
AUR.

If you are using Manjaro, you can install polybar to get the latest stable release using sudo pacman -S polybar.

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 Leap polybar is available from t