🪟 WINbar

An elegant, highly customizable, and fluid status bar for Windows inspired by Linux's Waybar. Built with PyQt6 and integrated deeply with Windows native APIs, WINbar behaves like a native desktop appbar—reserving space on your screen and providing beautiful acrylic blur effects, live system monitoring, virtual desktop integration, and interactive widgets.

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✨ Features

• 🧱 Native Windows AppBar Integration: Registers with the Windows Shell (via SHAppBarMessage) to act as a desktop appbar. It docks at the top of the screen and automatically forces other windowed applications to respect its boundaries.
• 🌀 Acrylic & Aero Blur Effects: Integrates with Windows composition APIs (SetWindowCompositionAttribute) to enable modern semi-transparent blur/acrylic effects for popups and menus.
• 💻 Virtual Desktop Workspaces: Real-time tracking and switching of Windows 10/11 Virtual Desktops utilizing pyvda. Displays workspace indicators similar to iOS page dots.
• 🎵 Media Integration (SMTC): Connects to Windows Global System Media Transport Controls (SMTC). Fetches real-time playback state, artist details, track title, and album art thumbnail. Includes an interactive animated wave seekbar!
• 📅 Dynamic Clock & Calendar Popup: A clock widget that reveals a slick calendar dashboard with sliding animations on hover. Features a loopable circular video player.
• 📊 System Resource Monitor: Real-time feedback on CPU and Memory (RAM) utilization.
• 🎛️ Gesture-based Controls:
  • Volume Adjustment: Scroll your mouse wheel up/down over the volume icon capsule to adjust the Windows master system volume in 2% steps (via pycaw).
  • Brightness Adjustment: Scroll your mouse wheel up/down anywhere over the main bar background area to dynamically adjust screen brightness in 5% steps (via PowerShell WMI bindings).

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📸 Screenshots

🎵 Media Controller & Seekbar

Interactive media player widget fetching real-time Windows SMTC data (artist, title, cover art) with an animated wave seekbar:

📅 Calendar Widget & Loopable Video Player

Clock hover popover featuring a complete iOS-style weekly calendar and a loopable circular video window:

🌐 System Connection & Popups

Glossy acrylic popup displaying current Wi-Fi/Ethernet network details and Bluetooth devices status:

🔍 App Launcher Search Dashboard

Search dashboard to quickly query applications, run system commands (like lock screen, sleep, shutdown), and perform calculations:

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🛠️ Tech Stack & Architecture

WaybarWin is composed of several modular Python scripts:

• main.py: Launches the application, manages multi-display screen detection, and instantiates the bars.
• bar.py: Contains the core WaybarWindow layout and custom widgets (WorkspacesWidget, SystemMonitorWidget, ClockWidget, WaveSeekBar, MediaPopupWidget).
• appbar.py: Low-level ctypes bindings for registering the window as a native Windows AppBar.
• theme.py: Theme engine managing colors, styles, and stylesheet loading.
• build.py: PyInstaller compilation helper.

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🚀 Getting Started

Prerequisites

Make sure you have Python 3.10+ installed. You will also need standard build tools for Python on Windows.

Installation

1. Clone this repository:

   git clone https://github.com/raj2005sriv/waybar-win.git
   cd waybar-win

2. Install the required dependencies:

   pip install PyQt6 psutil pyvda winsdk

Note

winsdk is required to integrate with the Windows System Media Transport Controls (SMTC) to read media titles and album art. pyvda requires the virtual desktop feature to be enabled on Windows.

Running the Application

To start the status bar in development mode:

python main.py

To run it silently in the background (using VBS helper):

wscript run.vbs

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📦 Compilation & Packaging

You can compile WaybarWin into a standalone .exe using PyInstaller. The repository includes a helper script build.py that packages the app windowed, cleans the build artifacts, embeds the version information, and attaches the video loop:

To compile the executable, run:

python build.py

The compiled output will be generated inside the dist/WaybarWin/ directory.

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🎨 Customization

You can customize the layout, colors, and font-families directly within theme.py:

• Palettes: Adjust the DARK_PALETTE and LIGHT_PALETTE dictionaries to change font colors, backgrounds, accent colors, separators, and hover transitions.
• CSS Styles: Customize stylesheets inside get_theme_stylesheet() using standard Qt QSS selectors.

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📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the version_info.txt file or licensing headers for details.