rwaybar

A taskbar for Wayland written in Rust. Works on any compositor supporting the layer_shell protocol (sway, most wlroots window managers, kwin).

Available Modules

• Clipboard (viewer)
• Clock and calendar
• Custom scripts or dbus API queries
• Disk (filesystem) free
• Icons (including custom images)
• File reader (for showing battery, temperature, load average, etc.)
• MPRIS-compliant media player support (title display, basic control)
• Pipewire and Pulseaudio volume and mute controls
• Sway (window tree, workspaces, binding mode)
• Tray

See the configuration documentation for details.

Other Features

• Clicks can execute custom scripts or provide input to existing ones
• Support for showing meters by choosing or fading between multiple images or glyphs.
• Reformatting of values using regular expressions and/or numeric expressions
• Config reload on SIGHUP

Building

cargo build --release
cp doc/rwaybar.toml ~/.config/
./target/release/rwaybar

You should modify the example config to match your outputs and to configure where and what you want on your bar. Specify the environment variable RUST_LOG=debug to enable more verbose debugging.

You can also enable or disable some features using cargo's feature flags. Currently there are two features:

• dbus - Enable dbus support. Required for MPRIS and tray; enabled by default.
• pulse - Enable pulseaudio support. Not enabled by default; requires pulse libraries.

Samples

These two samples are using the same configuration, only the background color differs. I like a transparent background on my taskbar, but I also configure my desktop background to be a slideshow. This means that I need the bar to be readable regardless of the color of the background, which was done in this example by using text-outline. The tray needs a solid background because some icons (kdeconnect, steam) aren't otherwise visible on light backgrounds.

Note: these images were captured on a scaled (HiDPI) output, which is why they appear double the size defined in the sample bar configuration.

Motivation

This started out as a 'how does wayland work, anyway?' project. I then decided that I liked the look of a transparent bar, and started adding features like text-outline to make the output more readable, and adding modules to display more data. I later decided to remove the C library dependencies that could be replaced by rust-native ones.