NanoBar — a native workspace bar for AeroSpace (Swift/SwiftUI, socket-based, zero-config)

[xeydev]

Sharing a tool I built for my own AeroSpace setup, in case it's useful to others here.

NanoBar is a menu-bar workspace indicator, written in Swift 6/SwiftUI. It listens on a Unix socket that gets a write from exec-on-workspace-change, so it updates instantly on workspace change without polling AeroSpace's state.

exec-on-workspace-change = ['/bin/bash', '-c',
  'printf "%s" "$AEROSPACE_FOCUSED_WORKSPACE" | nc -U /tmp/nanobar-notify.sock']

That's the entire integration — one line in .aerospace.toml.

What it does beyond that:

• Zero-config by default; optional flat key = value config file if you want to customize (bar position, pill style, colors), live-reloaded on save
• One bar per screen automatically (multi-monitor)
• Hides when a fullscreen window covers the screen
• Sidebar mode (bar-position = left | right) as well as a top bar
• Liquid Glass pill rendering on macOS 26, vibrancy blur fallback on macOS 15

Requires macOS 15+. MIT licensed, Homebrew install:

brew install xeydev/tap/nanobar
brew services start nanobar

Repo: https://github.com/xeydev/nanobar

If anyone's tried it and hits an edge case with the socket integration or config format, I'd rather hear about it here than guess at what breaks in other setups.