Header image source: Colorful bus Pakistani via Wikimedia Commons.

Bright, bus-art Waybar for niri on Wayland.

• Loud per-chip gradients with compact, tooltip-heavy modules.
• A two-strip layout: the main working bar at the bottom and a compact telemetry strip at the top-left.
• Custom helpers for CPU temperature smoothing, disk I/O, clipboard preview, Codex quota display, VPN device display, media metadata, Bluetooth HID battery readings, external IP with click-through IP lookup, system and user systemd failure monitoring, Niri keyboard layout state, a hidden-by-default YubiKey touch chip, and a Vocalinux activity chip with separate listening and processing states.
• A stasis chip on the top strip shows idle-manager state as words instead of ambiguous icons: WAIT, RUN, HOLD, DBUS, CALL, APP, PAUSE, DOWN. Left click toggles manual inhibit, middle click reloads config, right click restarts the service. These user-triggered actions show their result through SwayOSD on the focused output.
• A screenshot helper so bar changes can be checked against the live UI instead of config-only guesses.

• waybar
• niri
• python3
• playerctl for the media chip
• curl for the external IP chip
• wf-recorder and ffmpeg for capture-waybar.sh
• wl-gammarelay-rs and optionally wl-gammarelay-applet
• swayosd-client if you want layout-switch, hardware-backlight, and gamma-brightness OSD
• vocalinux if you want the dictation activity chip
• systemctl for the systemd failure chip

This repo is meant to live at ~/.config/waybar.

mkdir -p ~/.config/waybar
cp -r . ~/.config/waybar/
chmod +x ~/.config/waybar/*.py ~/.config/waybar/*.sh
~/.local/bin/restart-waybar

Private local values live in ignored local.env. Copy local.env.example to local.env and fill a work-calendar URL there instead of committing it to config.jsonc.

• The config is pinned to eDP-1 right now.
• Startup logging for login-time failures goes to ~/.local/state/waybar/startup.log, and each launch also gets a dedicated run directory under ~/.local/state/waybar/runs/ with a small allowlisted environment snapshot, systemd status, user-journal snapshots, and the raw waybar warning-level log. ~/.local/state/waybar/latest points at the newest run.
• Run directories older than 2 days are pruned by start-with-log.sh on each Waybar startup so diagnostics stay local and bounded.
• Flat helper logs such as startup.log and clipboard-watch.log are trimmed to the latest 2000 lines once they exceed 1 MiB.
• The default niri spawn-at-startup "waybar" is intentionally intercepted via ~/.local/bin/waybar, which forwards into start-with-log.sh before starting the real binary so login-time failures survive after the session is gone.
• Waybar uses deterministic visibility signals: SIGUSR1 shows the bars and SIGUSR2 hides them. Config/style watch reloads must use ~/.local/bin/restart-waybar instead of SIGUSR2.
• Right-clicking the bottom bar's power chip hides both bars.
• Mod+A toggles sticky Waybar visibility. Bare Mod opens Walker through walker-with-waybar; on a single active output that wrapper shows Waybar temporarily while Walker is open, but it will not hide a bar that was made sticky-visible by Mod+A.
• Mod+D launches ~/.local/bin/walker-with-waybar; when Niri reports exactly one output, the wrapper shows Waybar temporarily before opening Walker and hides it again only if the wrapper itself showed it. Multi-output sessions leave Waybar visibility alone.
• clipboard-watch.sh does not signal Waybar immediately on startup and skips the first wl-paste --watch event for each selection. Waybar renders clipboard modules during its own startup, and an immediate SIGRTMIN+10 can kill a just-spawned Waybar before it installs the custom signal handler. Later clipboard changes still signal Waybar and are logged in ~/.local/state/waybar/clipboard-watch.log.
• The power chip uses power-menu-action.sh instead of raw systemctl calls so challenge responses from logind are handled cleanly. When Waybar runs outside the real logind session, the helper delegates the action through power-menu-session-bridge.sh, which is started by the login fish shell and listens on a private FIFO under $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/waybar-power-menu/.
• The top strip owns the newer status chips first: Codex, systemd, Vocalinux, top-processes, clipboard preview, and external IP. The disk I/O chip stays on the bottom bar. When the bottom bar gets crowded, newer chips should move to the top before older baseline controls.
• Expensive polling chips are intentionally not 1 Hz: top-process sampling runs every 10 seconds, while disk/network/VPN/loopback and built-in CPU/memory refresh every 5 seconds. Keep the bar responsive through signals for eventful chips instead of returning to broad 1-second polling.
• Critical chips use static high-contrast colors and glow rather than infinite CSS blink animations. GTK keeps repainting animated Waybar CSS even while the bars are hidden, so avoid reintroducing always-on animations for status chips.
• The CPU temperature chip reads coretemp / Package id 0 from hwmon first so it matches sensors package-temperature output; x86_pkg_temp thermal-zone data is only a fallback.
• The YubiKey chip is hidden by default. ~/.local/bin/yubikey-touch-osd writes its state under $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/yubikey-touch-osd/waybar.json and signals Waybar with SIGRTMIN+11; yubikey-touch-status.py only shows a blinking YK ... chip while the detector reports an active GPG, U2F, or MAC touch wait. On the inactive-to-active transition the same watcher plays the cached speech prompt ~/.local/share/yubikey-touch-osd/waiting-for-yubikey-v2.mp3 through ~/.local/bin/play-audio-with-afk-volume.
• For stasis, RUN deliberately means "the idle plan is currently advancing" rather than "the monitor is off". It can correspond to a lock countdown or any later action stage, so the exact meaning lives in the tooltip, not in the short chip text. The tooltip also includes a full legend for every short state code.
• The stasis chip actions call ~/.local/bin/stasis-action-osd. The helper reports pause/resume, config reload, restart, and failures through SwayOSD on the focused Niri output. Automatic idle-state transitions remain quiet.
• The audio chip uses private-use glyphs through Nerd Font. Keep its icons to codepoints present in Symbols Nerd Font; older Font Awesome glyphs such as U+F590 and U+F6A9 render as missing boxes on this machine.
• When the default sink is muted, the audio chip shows a blinking MUTED label instead of relying on a small icon, because mute can otherwise be easy to forget during speech-notification tests.
• The gamma-brightness chip scroll actions call ~/.local/bin/gamma-brightness-osd instead of raw busctl, so Waybar scrolls use the shared wl-gammarelay-rs update and focused-output SwayOSD path.
• The hardware backlight chip scroll actions call ~/wb/radar/bin/adaptive-brightness-osd. With only the built-in Niri output active, it controls intel_backlight through hw-backlight-osd; with any external output active, it controls wl-gammarelay-rs gamma brightness through gamma-brightness-osd. Both paths keep SwayOSD pinned to the focused Niri output.
• The top-strip Bluetooth HID battery chip reads connected Bluetooth devices from bluetoothctl, keeps keyboard/mouse-like HID devices with battery data, and hides itself when none are connected. It blinks only below 10% so low external-device battery is hard to miss without being noisy at normal charge levels.
• capture-waybar.sh still captures the bottom bar strip intentionally.
• Network chips use net-dev.py for the bottom-left Ethernet-like and Wi-Fi chips. The Ethernet-like chip prefers the active default-route non-Wi-Fi, non-VPN interface, so USB tethering interfaces such as enp0s20f0u1 win over an unplugged onboard Ethernet port. The Wi-Fi chip is hidden when no Wi-Fi interface is up with an IPv4 address. Loopback still uses Waybar's built-in network#loopback module.
• Clipboard preview treats only real plain-text MIME types as text. Browser image copies often expose text/html plus image/*; in that case the chip should prefer the image path and render [img] instead of showing HTML preview markup.

./capture-waybar.sh assets/waybar.png

That keeps the README screenshot aligned with the live bottom bar.