hyprland-wiki/content/Useful Utilities/Status-Bars.md

weight	title
2	Status bars

Simple status bars

Typically you'll be able to configure the order and style of widgets with little to no coding skill.

Waybar

Waybar is a GTK status bar made specifically for wlroots compositors and supports Hyprland by default. To use it, it's recommended to use your distro's package.

To start configuring, copy the configuration files from /etc/xdg/waybar/ into ~/.config/waybar/.

To use the workspaces module, replace all the occurrences of sway/workspaces with hyprland/workspaces. Additionally replace all occurrences of sway/mode with hyprland/submap

For more info regarding configuration, see The Waybar Wiki.

How to launch

Type waybar into your terminal. In order to have Waybar launch alongside Hyprland, add this line to your Hyprland configuration:

exec-once = waybar

Waybar also provides a systemd service. If you use Hyprland with uwsm, you can enable it, using the following command.

systemctl --user enable --now waybar.service

Waybar FAQ

Active workspace doesn't show up

Replace #workspaces button.focused with #workspaces button.active in ~/.config/waybar/style.css.

Scrolling through workspaces

Since a lot of configuration options from sway/workspaces are missing, you should deduce some of them by yourself. In the case of scrolling, it should look like this:

"hyprland/workspaces": {
     "format": "{icon}",
     "on-scroll-up": "hyprctl dispatch workspace e+1",
     "on-scroll-down": "hyprctl dispatch workspace e-1"
}

Window title is missing

The prefix for the window module that provides the title is hyprland not wlr. In your Waybar config, insert this module:

"modules-center": ["hyprland/window"],

If you are using multiple monitors, you may want to insert the following option:

"hyprland/window": {
    "separate-outputs": true
},

ashell

ashell is a ready to go Wayland status bar for Hyprland

• Ashell is ready to use out of the box. Just install it, start using it, and customize only what you need.
• Ashell comes with essential modules like workspaces, time, battery, network, and more. No need to hunt for plugins or write custom scripts.
• Powered by iced. A cross-platform GUI library for Rust
• Has a pretty limited configuration options. It's a good and a bad thing at the same time. You can get a very decent result quickly and with a little effort, but some tricky waybar-alike tweaks are not possible.
• Calendar is absent but in the roadmap

Workaround for calendar

[modules]
center = [ "calendar", "Clock" ]
# ...
[[CustomModule]]
name = "calendar"
icon = ""
command = "zenity --calendar --title=\"Calendar\""

Widget systems

Use them when you want custom menus with fully customizable layout. You basically need to write code, but widget systems significantly ease the process. Below are three popular choices in alphabetical order.

	AGS/Astal	EWW	Quickshell
UI Toolkit	GTK 3/4	GTK 3	Qt
Config language	JS(X)/TS/languages that support Gobject Introspection	Yuck (EWW's flavor of Lisp)	QML

AGS/Astal

• Astal is a suite and framework to craft desktop shells and Wayland widgets with GTK.
• AGS (Aylur's GTK Shell) is a scaffolding tool for Astal and TypeScript/Javascript(X). In simple words, it eases creation of Astal projects in those languages.

To get started with Astal, see its installation instructions and examples. For AGS, see its Quick start page.

Advantages

• Language flexibility: You can use your favorite if it supports Gobject Introspection (although JS(X)/TS are most well-supported by AGS)
• Provides a large set of libraries, including Network (both Wi-Fi and Ethernet) and Bluetooth

Disadvantages

• Does not provide hot reload out of the box

Eww

Eww (ElKowar's Wacky Widgets) is a widget system made in Rust + GTK, which allows the creation of custom widgets similarly to AwesomeWM. The key difference is that it is independent of window manager/compositor.

Install Eww either using your distro's package manager, by searching eww-wayland, or by manually compiling. In the latter case, you can follow the instructions.

Advantages

• Its Lisp-like config syntax is simple compared to other config languages
• Supports styling with SCSS out of the box

Disadvantages

• Heavy reliance on external scripts/programs, as it does not provide many libraries
• Performance
  • Only supports GTK 3, which does not support GPU acceleration
  • Overhead from the use of external scripts and unnecessary component recreations on data re-evaluation

Configuration

There are a few examples listed in the Readme. It's also highly recommended to read through the Configuration options.

{{< callout >}}

Read the Wayland section carefully, otherwise Eww won't work on Hyprland.

{{< /callout >}}

Here are some example widgets that might be useful for Hyprland:

Workspaces widget

This widget displays a list of workspaces 1-10. Each workspace can be clicked on to jump to it, and scrolling over the widget cycles through them. It supports different styles for the current workspace, occupied workspaces, and empty workspaces. It requires bash, awk, stdbuf, grep, seq, socat, jq, and Python 3.

~/.config/eww.yuck

...
(deflisten workspaces :initial "[]" "bash ~/.config/eww/scripts/get-workspaces")
(deflisten current_workspace :initial "1" "bash ~/.config/eww/scripts/get-active-workspace")
(defwidget workspaces []
  (eventbox :onscroll "bash ~/.config/eww/scripts/change-active-workspace {} ${current_workspace}" :class "workspaces-widget"
    (box :space-evenly true
      (label :text "${workspaces}${current_workspace}" :visible false)
      (for workspace in workspaces
        (eventbox :onclick "hyprctl dispatch workspace ${workspace.id}"
          (box :class "workspace-entry ${workspace.windows > 0 ? "occupied" : "empty"}"
            (label :text "${workspace.id}" :class "workspace-entry ${workspace.id == current_workspace ? "current" : ""}" )
            )
          )
        )
      )
    )
  )
...

~/.config/eww/scripts/change-active-workspace

#!/usr/bin/env bash
function clamp {
  min=$1
  max=$2
  val=$3
  python -c "print(max($min, min($val, $max)))"
}

direction=$1
current=$2
if test "$direction" = "down"
then
  target=$(clamp 1 10 $(($current+1)))
  echo "jumping to $target"
  hyprctl dispatch workspace $target
elif test "$direction" = "up"
then
  target=$(clamp 1 10 $(($current-1)))
  echo "jumping to $target"
  hyprctl dispatch workspace $target
fi

~/.config/eww/scripts/get-active-workspace

#!/usr/bin/env bash

hyprctl monitors -j | jq '.[] | select(.focused) | .activeWorkspace.id'

socat -u UNIX-CONNECT:$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/hypr/$HYPRLAND_INSTANCE_SIGNATURE/.socket2.sock - |
  stdbuf -o0 awk -F '>>|,' -e '/^workspace>>/ {print $2}' -e '/^focusedmon>>/ {print $3}'

~/.config/eww/scripts/get-workspaces

#!/usr/bin/env bash

spaces (){
  WORKSPACE_WINDOWS=$(hyprctl workspaces -j | jq 'map({key: .id | tostring, value: .windows}) | from_entries')
  seq 1 10 | jq --argjson windows "${WORKSPACE_WINDOWS}" --slurp -Mc 'map(tostring) | map({id: ., windows: ($windows[.]//0)})'
}

spaces
socat -u UNIX-CONNECT:$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/hypr/$HYPRLAND_INSTANCE_SIGNATURE/.socket2.sock - | while read -r line; do
  spaces
done

Active window title widget

This widget simply displays the title of the active window. It requires awk, stdbuf, socat, and jq.

~/.config/eww/eww.yuck

...
(deflisten window :initial "..." "sh ~/.config/eww/scripts/get-window-title")
(defwidget window_w []
  (box
    (label :text "${window}"
    )
  )
...

~/.config/eww/scripts/get-window-title

#!/bin/sh
hyprctl activewindow -j | jq --raw-output .title
socat -u UNIX-CONNECT:$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/hypr/$HYPRLAND_INSTANCE_SIGNATURE/.socket2.sock - | stdbuf -o0 awk -F '>>|,' '/^activewindow>>/{print $3}'

Quickshell

Quickshell is a flexbile QtQuick-based desktop shell toolkit. Note that although Qt is notoriously hard to theme, Quickshell can be styled independently.

To get started, see the setup instructions and a guided hello world

Advantages

• Provides advanced Wayland/Hyprland integrations, for example live window previews
• Automatically reloads config on changes out of the box

Disadvantages

• Qt can be less intuitive to work with compared to GTK for its positioning system
• Does not yet provide a Wi-Fi service at the time of writing
• It is still in alpha and minor breaking changes are to be expected
• Styles are declared with components instead of in CSS, which might be less familiar for some people

Tips

Blur

Use the blur and ignorealpha layer rules. The former enables blur, and the latter makes it ignore insufficiently opaque regions. Ideally, the value used with ignorealpha is higher than the shadow opacity and lower than the bar/menu content's opacity. Additionally, if it has transparent popups, you can use the blurpopups rule.