Waybar custom modules

This repo contains five custom module providers for Waybar. Each provider is a binary that you can configure Waybar to use with its custom module support, and you'll get something useful. Most notably, you can also generate sparklines with the CPU and memory related modules.

The available modules are:

• cpu: a clone of Waybar's built in CPU module, except with sparkline support. support.
• cpufreq: a module to render the current average CPU frequency.
• mem: a clone of Waybar's built in memory module, except with sparkline support.
• swaync: a module that integrates with swaync.
• webcam: a module that detects if a webcam is attached and displays an appropriate icon.

Platform support

These modules will only work on Linux at present.

The cpufreq module also requires cpufreq directories to be available in sysfs. (They probably are if you're on an Intel or AMD processor and a recent kernel, but YMMV, and I'm certainly not an expert on this.)

The swaync module requires libdbus.

The webcam module requires libudev.

Building

This is a fairly standard Rust project: cargo build will give you binaries in target/debug, and cargo build --release will give you binaries in target/release.

Common options

Except for swaync and webcam, each binary accepts the same general options:

• --sparkline N: if N is greater than 1, then the output will be formatted for use with the Sparks font, which will need to be installed and configured separately.
• --class CLASS: to include a specific class for Waybar styling purposes.
• --interval INTERVAL: the interval between updates. By default this is 1 second, but you may want to make this slower in real world use. Any format accepted by humantime is supported: for example, 5s for 5 seconds.

Configuring waybar

OK, so how do we get the sparklines going?

1. Install the Sparks font. The easiest way to do this is to copy the OTF files into $HOME/.local/share/fonts.

2. Build the binaries in this repository with cargo build --release.

3. Create module(s) in the waybar configuration in $HOME/.config/waybar/config. Here's a snippet of how I have them configured (you'll need to replace $WCM_PATH with the actual path to your target/release directory containing the binaries):

   "custom/cpu": {
       "format": "{} ",
       "exec": "$WCM_PATH/cpu -i 5s",
       "return-type": "json"
   },
   "custom/cpufreq": {
       "format": "{} ",
       "exec": "$WCM_PATH/cpufreq -i 5s",
       "return-type": "json"
   },
   "custom/mem": {
       "format": "{} ",
       "exec": "$WCM_PATH/mem -i 5s",
       "return-type": "json"
   }

4. Configure the styles for the new modules. You must set the font-family for the rendering to work; you'll probably also want to copy the existing colour scheme that you have for the default #cpu and #memory modules. Mine looks like this:

   #custom-cpufreq,
   #custom-cpu,
   #custom-mem {
       font-family: "Sparks Dot-line Thick";
   }

5. Restart waybar and hope for the best.

swaync

The swaync module is only useful if you use swaync: if not, you can safely ignore it.

Configuration might look something like this:

    "custom/notifications": {
        "format": "{icon} {}",
        "format-icons": ["", ""],
        "exec": "$WCM_PATH/swaync",
        "on-click": "swaync-client -t",
        "return-type": "json"
    }

This uses an open envelope icon when there are notifications, and configures the notification centre to toggle when clicked. You can also fade the icon when Do Not Disturb mode is active with something like this in your stylesheet:

#custom-notifications.dnd {
    opacity: 0.5;
}

webcam

The webcam module is simpler than the others: it uses udev to monitor if a video device is attached. Useful if your USB hub is a little flaky first thing in the morning, you don't always have a video device available even when you think it's plugged in, and you're often cutting it real fine to make that Zoom sync.

The defaults should be reasonable, but it does take a handful of options: cargo run --bin webcam -- --help will give you the set.

To configure it into Waybar, something like this should do:

    "custom/webcam": {
        "format": "{}",
        "exec": "$WCM_PATH/webcam",
        "return-type": "json"
    }

The default output uses Font Awesome icons. You probably have this configured already, since Waybar's defaults use it, but if not you'll want something like this for that module:

#custom-webcam {
    font-family: "Font Awesome 5 Free", sans-serif;
}

#custom-webcam.not-found {
    opacity: 0.2;
}

Replace sans-serif with whatever font you use elsewhere on Waybar.