Topbar

A lightweight, feature-rich status bar for the Niri Wayland compositor, built with GTK4 and Vala.

Features

Left Section

• System Resources — Live CPU usage, RAM usage, CPU temperature, and disk usage. Click to open btop.
• Apps — Launcher button to open the application menu.
• Tools — Collapsible toolbar with:
  • Screen Recorder toggle
  • Color Picker
• Niri Workspaces — Per-monitor workspace indicators showing open windows with app icons. Supports:
  • Left-click to focus a workspace
  • Scroll to cycle through windows in a workspace
  • Long-press to toggle the Niri overview

Center Section

• Clock — Live time display (250ms refresh). Click to toggle between local and UTC time.
• Date — Current date display. Click to open a calendar popover.

Right Section

• Bluetooth — Shows connection status and connected device name.
  • Left-click to open the Bluetooth launcher
  • Right-click to toggle power
• Volume — Shows current volume level and mute state.
  • Left-click to toggle mute
  • Scroll to adjust volume
• Wi-Fi — Shows connected SSID and signal icon.
  • Click to open the NetworkManager text UI (nmtui)
• Battery — Shows charge percentage and charging status icon.
• System Tray — SNI (StatusNotifierItem) tray icon support.
• Power Menu — Button to open the power menu.

OSD

• Volume OSD — On-screen display triggered via IPC for hardware key volume changes.

Dependencies

• gtk4
• gtk4-layer-shell
• glib-2.0 / gio-2.0 / gio-unix-2.0
• gee-0.8
• json-glib-1.0
• libnm (NetworkManager)
• sass (for SCSS compilation)
• vala compiler
• meson build system

Building & Installing

bash scripts/install.sh

This script performs a clean build and installs the binary system-wide:

rm -rf build/
meson setup build
meson compile -C build
sudo meson install -C build

Running

topbar

To toggle (start if not running, kill if running):

bash scripts/toggle.sh

Logs are written to /tmp/topbar.log when run via the toggle script.

IPC

Topbar listens on a Unix socket at $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/topbar.sock for volume control commands. This is used to trigger the Volume OSD from hardware media keys.

Supported commands:

Command	Action
volume-up	Increase volume
volume-down	Decrease volume
volume-mute	Toggle mute

topbarctl

topbarctl is a companion CLI tool for sending IPC commands to a running topbar instance.

topbarctl <command>

Examples:

topbarctl volume-up
topbarctl volume-down
topbarctl volume-mute

You can also send commands manually via socat:

echo "volume-up" | socat - UNIX-CONNECT:$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/topbar.sock

Multi-Monitor Support

Topbar automatically creates one bar per connected monitor and handles hotplug events — monitors added or removed at runtime are handled gracefully.

Project Structure

topbar/
├── assets/
│   ├── style.scss              # Bar stylesheet (compiled to CSS at build time)
│   ├── kitty-custom.svg        # Custom Kitty terminal icon
│   └── topbar.gresource.xml    # GResource manifest
├── src/
│   ├── main.vala               # Entry point
│   ├── app.vala                # Application lifecycle, monitor management
│   ├── ipc.vala                # Unix socket IPC server
│   ├── ui/
│   │   ├── bar.vala            # Bar window (layer shell setup)
│   │   ├── bar_left.vala       # Left section widgets
│   │   ├── bar_center.vala     # Clock and date widgets
│   │   ├── bar_right.vala      # Status widgets (volume, wifi, battery, etc.)
│   │   ├── niri_workspaces.vala
│   │   ├── system_resources.vala
│   │   └── tray.vala
│   ├── osd/
│   │   └── volume_osd.vala     # Volume on-screen display
│   └── services/
│       ├── niri_ipc.vala       # Niri compositor IPC client
│       ├── system_resources.vala
│       ├── battery.vala
│       ├── network.vala
│       ├── volume.vala
│       ├── bluetooth.vala
│       ├── screen_rec.vala
│       ├── tray.vala
│       └── utils.vala
├── tools/
│   └── topbarctl.vala          # CLI IPC client
├── scripts/
│   ├── install.sh              # Build and install script
│   └── toggle.sh               # Start/restart script
└── meson.build

License

This project does not currently include a license file.