barva is an audio visualizer that pulses the background of your terminal.

The equalizer shown in the gif is cava.

Navigation:

• Installation
  • AUR
  • Manual
• Usage
• Customization
• Scripts
  • to-all-ttys.sh
  • bspwm-borders.sh
• Tips and tricks
  • Compositor
  • FPS
  • Pywal
  • Vim

Installation

AUR

barva-git is available in AUR.

Manual

barva depends on PulseAudio and its headers:

• On Debian (Ubuntu, Mint, ...) you need pulseaudio and libpulse-dev packages.
• On Fedora (CentOS, ...) you need pulseaudio and pulseaudio-libs-devel packages.
• On Arch (Manjaro, ...) you need just pulseaudio package.

Clone this repository, cd into its directory and run make (GCC is required). The binary is named barva. You can move it to somewhere in your $PATH.

Usage

You need to specify the name of PulseAudio source from which barva should read audio. It's done via BARVA_SOURCE environmental variable. The common case is that you want barva to monitor your default audio sink. It can be accomplished with the help of pa-get-default-monitor.sh:

• If you have built barva manually, cd into the repository and run export BARVA_SOURCE=$(./scripts/pa-get-default-monitor.sh).
• If you have got barva from AUR, run export BARVA_SOURCE=$(/usr/share/barva/pa-get-default-monitor.sh).

Then run barva or ./barva while listening to some music. The background of the terminal should turn black and pulse towards white. Press Ctrl+C to exit.

You can send barva to the background and switch to another CLI program e.g Vim: just run barva &. To terminate barva, run killall barva or some other equivalent.

Customization

Customization is done via environmental variables (no CLI yet):

Variable	Default value	Description
BARVA_SOURCE	NULL	The PulseAudio source from which audio is read
BARVA_BG	#000000	The background color of the terminal
BARVA_TARGET	#FFFFFF	The color "towards which" the background pulses
BARVA_FPS	60	The number of times the background is updated per sec
BARVA_OUTPUT_FORMAT	TTY if stdout is a tty, HEX otherwise	The format of output TTY: change the background of the terminal HEX: output the color in hex, one per line

Scripts

All scripts in scripts/ (except pa-get-default-monitor.sh) expect output of barva to be piped into them e.g barva | bspwm-borders.sh. If you have got barva from AUR, the scripts are located in /usr/share/barva/.

to-all-ttys.sh

Pulses the backgrounds of all terminals found in /dev/pts/. Consider using this script instead of running multiple barva instances: it will save you some CPU time.

bspwm-borders.sh

Pulses the borders of not-focused windows under BSPWM.

Tips and tricks

Compositor

If you use "raw" Xorg without a DE, consider running a compositor like picom or compton. It eliminates tearing, thus making barva smoother.

FPS

The CPU usage of barva is roughly proportional to the value of BARVA_FPS. Therefore, lowering the value is the first thing to try to improve performance (please report such cases, barva is supposed to be reasonably fast everywhere).

If you have a high refresh-rate monitor, you may try making BARVA_FPS bigger: the appearance may improve (at the cost of CPU cycles, though).

Pywal

Pywal generates a nice ~/.cache/wal/colors.sh file that you may use to set the colors used by barva

source ~/.cache/wal/colors.sh
export BARVA_BG=$background BARVA_TARGET=$foreground
barva &

Vim

To let barva pulse the background of Vim, use a colorscheme that doesn't change the default terminal background color e.g peachpuff. termguicolors (NeoVim) must be off, too.