abar

Minimalistic Wayland-native status bar using Cairo + Pango, inspired by ashell/waybar.

Requirements

Build dependencies:

• Rust toolchain (stable, edition 2024)
• libcairo2-dev / cairo
• libpango1.0-dev / pango (includes pangocairo)
• libwayland-dev / wayland
• A FreeDesktop icon theme (e.g. hicolor, candy-icons)

Build

# All modules enabled (recommended):
cargo build --release --features clock,keyboard,workspaces,window,mpris,tray

# With SVG icon support:
cargo build --release --features clock,keyboard,workspaces,window,mpris,tray,svg

# Minimal (clock only):
cargo build --release --features clock

Features

Feature	Description
clock	Clock module with format rotation and timezone cycling.
keyboard	Keyboard layout module driven by an exec script.
workspaces	Workspace list module driven by an exec script.
window	Active window title module driven by an exec script.
mpris	Media player info module driven by an exec script.
tray	SNI system tray via trayd and an exec script.
svg	SVG icon support (requires resvg; PNG-only without this flag).

No features are enabled by default.

Configuration

abar follows XDG conventions:

Path	Description
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/abar/config.toml	Bar layout and module config (default: ~/.config/abar/config.toml).
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/abar/themes/<name>.toml	Theme file referenced by theme key in config.
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/abar/scripts/	Recommended location for exec scripts.

Override paths at launch:

abar --config /path/to/config.toml --theme /path/to/theme.toml

See examples/config.toml and examples/theme.toml for annotated reference configs.

Exec script contract

All exec-handler modules (keyboard, workspaces, window, mpris, tray) are driven by user scripts. See docs/EXEC.md for the full JSON contract, field reference, and script lifecycle documentation.

Icon theme

Custom modules and tray items use FreeDesktop icon names. abar reads the XDG_ICON_THEME environment variable to select which theme to search (PNG preferred, SVG supported via the svg feature).

export XDG_ICON_THEME=candy-icons

If XDG_ICON_THEME is unset, abar falls back to hicolor. Theme inheritance chains defined in index.theme are not followed — set the theme that directly contains your icons.

Icons that cannot be resolved are displayed as text (the module name) with a warning logged.

License

GPL-3.0-only