Eternally work in progress.. Currently contains:

• a Niri workspaces implementation (auto detects monitors via Niri as well).
• Laptop stuff (Wifi, brightness, battery)
• Bluetooth & Audio stuff (needs some renaming, currently the menu component is called bluetooth menu)
• Tray
• CPU & Memory usage

Currently there is no Niri implementation yet in Astal, so the way this communicates with Niri is through the IPC in a custom typescript client. The client is by no means well implemented, and I fully intend to replace it when something better comes out. This has some interesting features however:

• Displays workspaces as pill/island groups
• Inside of each workspace group, display the index (matches the keybinds that I set up in my niri config, Super+123456789)
• For each application running in a workspace, also display the icon of that application so that I can get an overview of what is running where.

The "islands" in the bar are implemented here (from left to right)

• ./widgets/ResourceUsage.tsx

  Displays CPU & Memory usage. It expands on hover or when values reach a certain threshold (when they become interesting to look at). Might add network information in the future (current bandwidth usage?). There is some CSS to change the colours when usage increases.

• ./widgets/CurrentCluster.tsx

  Displays the cluster that Kubectl currently points at. Very useful when switching between different clusters frequently. Might decide to move this to my terminal prompt at some point, but for now I like it here.

• ./widgets/LaptopStuff.tsx (not shown in the screenshot)

  Displays Wifi information, as well as battery & brightness percentages. I implemented a flashy animation (literally) when the battery is almost empty.

• ./widgets/AudioBluetooth.tsx

  Contains bluetooth and audio indicators. I mixed bluetooth and audio settings because I mostly use bluetooth for headphones/headsets. This also serves as a button to open a menu to connect to new devices & switch input sources (very useful for plugging in new microphones during meetings).

• ./widgets/Tray.tsx

  The tray is pretty much copied from the Astal example, I didn't really change anything

• ./widgets/DateTime.tsx

  Displays date & time in the format that I always used since I first started writing dotfiles, also not super interesting

The menu that is opened by the AudioBluetooth island button is implemented in ./windows/BluetoothMenu.tsx (10/10 naming). What is interesting is that it also uses Upowerd (the battery observer daemon used mostly on laptops) on my desktop (no battery) to keep track of battery levels of bluetooth devices. It can then display that (if available) in the menu as well which is super useful. I really want to replace that window with a GtkPopover so that I don't have to position it to the top-right of my screen, and can instead align it to the button widget that opens it. But alas, I tried to get popovers to work for 10 minutes and failed, so I will wait until someone else does this in gtk3 typescript.

This repo comes with a flake.nix which provides an overlay you can easily use in your NixOS configuration. To use it: apply the overlay to your nixpkgs in your flake.nix:

{
  description = "your flake.nix";
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "nixpkgs";
    ags.url = "github:maxverbeek/astalconfig";
  };

  outputs = { ... }:

  # somewhere in your flake, where you create your nixpkgs:
  let nixpkgs = import nixpkgs { inherit system; overlays = [ ags.overlays.default ]; } in {}
}

I personally run this stuff through a systemd service using the following systemd module:

{ pkgs, ... }:
{
  systemd.user.services.ags = {
    Unit = {
      Description = "Astal (ags) bar";
      Wants = [ "niri.service" ];
      After = [ "niri.service" ];
    };
    Install = {
      WantedBy = [ "graphical-session.target" ];
    };
    Service = {
      ExecStart = "${pkgs.ags-max}/bin/ags-max";
      Restart = "always";
      RestartSec = "5s";

      # disable logging for this, because child apps (such as anything i launch
      # with the launcher) will end up logging here, and chrome is super
      # verbose + may log sensitive info
      StandardOutput = "null";
      StandardError = "null";

      # Add environment variables for xwayland-satellite so that stuff started
      # through here can use Xwayland through this.
      # FIXME: the value for this is set in system configuration but i cannot
      # access that from home configuration
      Environment = [ "DISPLAY=:0" ];
    };
  };
}

I also install the ags cli tool (re-exported from the same overlay) so that I can use it to make requests to my ags instance:

{
  # home-manager example
  home.packages = [ pkgs.ags ];

  # or
  environment.systemPackages = [ pkgs.ags ];
}

ags -i ags-max toggle launcher

• Google calendar thing (would have to write a google oauth client in Vala probably) to display upcoming meetings
• Something to keep track of tickets maybe
• Gitlab merge request list (stuff where I am asked for a review)