DivBar

Visual dividers for your Linux taskbar. Any desktop environment.

Linux taskbars don't give you a way to group pinned apps. Ten icons in a row, no separation, no breathing room. DivBar fixes that by generating .desktop entries with thin divider icons you can drag onto the panel between your app groups.

No panel plugins. No widgets. No compilation.

Requirements

Bash 4.4+, and either zenity or kdialog for the dialogs. Zenity ships with most GTK desktops (GNOME, XFCE, Cinnamon, MATE, Budgie, Pantheon). Plasma ships kdialog. DivBar figures out which one you have and uses it.

Tested on KDE Plasma, GNOME, XFCE, Cinnamon, MATE, LXQt, Budgie, Pantheon, Sway, Hyprland, i3, LXDE, Deepin, Enlightenment.

Install

From source:

git clone https://github.com/danielslay86/divbar.git
cd divbar
bash install.sh

From the AUR:

yay -S divbar

From Flathub:

flatpak install flathub net.slaylab.DivBar

The installer puts assets in ~/.local/share/divbar/assets/, the executable in ~/.local/bin/divbar, and adds a menu entry. It refreshes the KDE menu cache if you're on Plasma; other DEs pick up new .desktop files on their own.

No root needed. Nothing outside $HOME gets touched.

Usage

Launch DivBar from your application menu, pick Add New Div, choose orientation (vertical for top/bottom taskbars, horizontal for side ones), pick a style or bring your own image. The new div shows up in your app launcher. Search "div" in your launcher, then drag or pin it onto the taskbar.

To remove divs, launch DivBar and pick Uninstall / Remove. You get three options: clear only the generated divs, complete uninstall of DivBar itself, or select specific divs to remove. Individual divs can also be unpinned directly from the taskbar.

Screenshots

KDE Plasma

Divs on bottom panel:

Divs on left panel:

GNOME

Divs on bottom panel (Dash to Panel Extension):

How it works

Each div is a .desktop file with Exec=/usr/bin/true and a thin image as its icon. The freedesktop spec is universal, so divs show up in every major DE's application menu and can be dragged to any panel that accepts pinned apps.

At launch DivBar checks XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP and KDE_FULL_SESSION to figure out your environment. On Plasma it uses kdialog and refreshes sycoca after adding a div. Everywhere else it uses zenity. If only one of the two is installed it uses that one regardless of DE. If neither is installed it tells you to install one.

Project layout

divbar/
├── install.sh          # installer
├── divbar.sh           # the app
├── verify.sh           # post-install sanity check
├── test_suite.sh       # 258 tests
├── assets/
│   ├── vertical/       # for top/bottom taskbars
│   └── horizontal/     # for left/right taskbars
├── LICENSE
├── README.md
└── CONTRIBUTING.md

Installed paths (source install):

What	Where
Executable	~/.local/bin/divbar
Assets	~/.local/share/divbar/assets/
Menu entry	~/.local/share/applications/divbar.desktop
Generated divs	~/.local/share/applications/div_N.desktop
Div icons	~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/div-*

Testing

bash test_suite.sh        # run all
bash test_suite.sh -v     # verbose

258 tests, 34 sections. Runs in a /tmp sandbox with mock dialog binaries, so you don't need an actual DE to run it. Covers backend detection across 15 desktop environments, both zenity and kdialog paths (add, remove, cancel, uninstall), input sanitization for path traversal and shell metacharacters, file permissions, installer idempotency, and the kbuildsycoca-only-on-KDE behavior.

Security notes

Installer bails if run as root. All destructive ops are scoped to $HOME/.local/share/. Filenames get sanitized before they hit the filesystem (strips path traversal sequences, shell metacharacters, and non-ASCII). Only .png, .svg, .jpg, .jpeg, and .ico are accepted as custom images. There's exactly one rm -rf in the installer and it targets a validated path. No eval anywhere. Generated .desktop files use Exec=/usr/bin/true so a pinned div can't execute anything if clicked.

Troubleshooting

"No dialog tool found." Install zenity (sudo apt install zenity) or kdialog (sudo apt install kdialog) depending on your DE.

Div doesn't show up after adding it on KDE. Run kbuildsycoca5 or kbuildsycoca6 manually. The installer does this automatically but sometimes the cache needs a nudge.

Not all divs appear on the taskbar. Plasma's Icons-Only Task Manager has rendering quirks that depend on panel orientation, size, DPI, and icon density. On some setups — especially narrow vertical panels — divs past the first few may not render even though their .desktop files exist. Workarounds: search for "Div" in your app launcher and drag from there, or try the standard Task Manager widget which handles custom entries differently.

Div doesn't show up after adding it on other DEs. Log out and back in. Most DEs watch ~/.local/share/applications/ for new files, but some only rescan on session start.

"Assets folder not found." Re-run bash install.sh from the cloned repo directory.

Blank icon on taskbar. touch ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/ and log out/in to force an icon cache refresh.

divbar: command not found in the terminal. ~/.local/bin isn't in your PATH. Add it:

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

License

MIT. Copyright Daniel Slay.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. Fork, branch, make sure tests pass, open a PR.