dwmbar is a very simple status bar written for dwm.

Maintenance status: Historically this project was unmaintained. Community maintenance is now being taken on by robinhirst11, who is willing to steward fixes and improvements. Issues and PRs are welcome.

While some modules will work without these dependencies, we recommend grabbing the ones you want for specific modules.

Highly Recommended:

• Any patched Nerd Font for icons.

Optional (By module):

See module prerequisites.

There is an AUR package for dwmbar, which can be installed with your favourite aur helper, or manually.

Please see the archwiki page for how to manually install AUR packages.

$ git clone https://github.com/thytom/dwmbar
$ cd dwmbar
$ sudo ./install.sh

dwmbar works by setting the root window name, which dwm displays. It does this by calling a config file. At runtime, dwmbar will use ~/.config/dwmbar/config if it exists, otherwise it will fall back to the default /usr/share/dwmbar/config.

Optionally, you can configure dwmbar with JSON via ~/.config/dwmbar/config.json or /usr/share/dwmbar/config.json. If jq is installed, dwmbar will prefer the JSON config when present; otherwise it will ignore JSON and use the bash config. You can copy defaults into your home directory with:

dwmbar -c

This copies both config and config.json into ~/.config/dwmbar/.

Add the line dwmbar & to your .xinitrc file to run on startup. You can also run dwmbar in terminal for testing purposes.

Most non-modular configuration is done in ~/.config/dwmbar/config, a bash script that calls module scripts in turn, caching their output and then constructing the bar from that.

Alternatively, you can use a JSON file at ~/.config/dwmbar/config.json (requires jq). JSON keys map to the same variables: modules, online_modules, delay, separator, left_padding, right_padding (and custom_dir if you want to override).

To add a module to the bar, simply include its name in the MODULES variable:

MODULES="mpd volumebar wifi battery"

Modules are displayed left-to-right in the order they are written in MODULES. By default, they are delimited by the SEPARATOR variable, which you can change.

You can also set LEFT_PADDING and RIGHT_PADDING in the config to add extra spacing (or text) at the left/right ends of the bar.

Default modules are located within /usr/share/dwmbar/modules, and custom modules can be placed in ~/.config/dwmbar/modules/custom. If a default module exists with the same name as a custom module, then the custom module will take precedence.

Default modules will possibly be overwritten during updates, so if you want to modify them be sure to make a copy in the custom folder, which will not be touched, and edit it there.

Modules can be written in any language, so long as they are executable and print their output to stdout.

If you installed manually using the provided scripts, you can uninstall with:

sudo ./uninstall.sh

This removes /usr/share/dwmbar and /usr/bin/dwmbar. If you previously copied configuration to your home directory via dwmbar -c, you may also remove ~/.config/dwmbar manually if desired.