waybar-theme-udt
Two waybar bars for DP-3: pill clusters, icons from the desktop's own icon theme instead of font glyphs, and colours driven by unified-desktop-theme.
DP-3 [📅 Wed 15/09] [🕑 14:32] [●] [●] [✉ 9] [🔊] [tray] [⏻] [🇮🇹]
DP-1 [1..8] [S] [ open windows ]
Each bracket is a pill. Pills group into clusters with gaps between them, so the bars read as a few objects rather than one strip. Hover cross-fades background and text over 0.3s; taskbar buttons underline in the accent.
DP-3 is rotated, so a bar there is only 1080px wide, which is why it carries status alone. The desktop itself, the workspaces and the window list, sits on DP-1 where there are 2560px to spread them across. Both bars are one waybar process reading one stylesheet: waybar takes a top-level array of bars, so they cannot drift apart.
This replaces the stock bar. Hyprland starts it from
~/.config/hypr/sections/autostart.lua; ~/.config/waybar/ is left on disk
but nothing reads it.
Install
./install.sh
Installs to ~/.config/waybar-udt/ and prints the command to run it. The
existing bar at ~/.config/waybar/ is left alone, so DP-1 keeps working
while this one is tried on DP-3.
Needs unified-desktop-theme checked out next to this repo: the palette comes
from there, and install.sh fails clearly if it is missing.
No glyphs
Every symbol on this bar is a real icon from Material-Black-Plum-Suru, the
theme GTK already uses. Icons keep their own colours, matching every other
application on the desktop.
waybar offers three ways to draw one, and this bar uses all three because no single one covers everything:
| Mechanism | Used by | Why |
|---|---|---|
icon-theme config key |
taskbar, tray | Native support, nothing else needed. |
image module |
volume, microphone, language | Takes a path from a script that resolves the current state. |
CSS background-image |
workspaces, clock, mail, presentation mode, launcher | format-icons takes text, not paths, and CSS can swap the image per state. |
The consequence worth knowing: the workspace icons live in
styles/modules.css, not in the module config. Changing one means editing
CSS. The alternative was eight custom modules faking a workspace strip,
which would have cost click-to-switch and the active and urgent states.
The language flag went the other way. hyprland/language styles as
#language and nothing else, with no per-language class, so the flag could
not be picked by a selector; it is an image module driven by wb-lang
instead.
wb-icon --selftest checks every icon name the bar asks for, CSS ones
included, and install.sh runs it. A missing icon renders as an empty pill
with nothing to say why, so it fails while someone is watching instead.
Why the icons do not follow the accent
2466 of the 5169 panel icons in Material-Black-Plum-Suru carry a hardcoded
gradient and are not recolourable. That is intended here: icons match the rest
of the desktop rather than the bar.
The icons this repo ships are the exception, because the icon theme has none
of them. icons/slackware.svg (Simple Icons, CC0) is single-path monochrome,
so install.sh tints it from the palette, twice: the launcher pill
inverts on hover, so the mark has to invert with it, dark on the accent pill
at rest and light on the dark pill hovered. One mark would be invisible in one
of the two states, which is what shipped twice before this. Both tints are
generated from one source file, so they cannot drift apart in shape.
icons/flag-it.svg and icons/burger.svg (Twemoji, CC-BY 4.0) keep their own
colours. The hamburger stands in for the English layout, which is what the
stock bar showed: not a flag, and deliberately so.
Layout
| Bar | Cluster | Modules |
|---|---|---|
| DP-3 | left | date, time, VM dots |
| DP-3 | right | privacy dots, mail, volume drawer, tray, presentation mode, language |
| DP-1 | left | workspaces |
| DP-1 | centre | launcher |
| DP-1 | right | open windows |
No battery, temperature, CPU, memory or backlight: this is a desktop.
The clock is the only text on the bar. An icon cannot say 14:32, so the icon sits before the text, which is what makes the pair match the icon-only pills around it.
Workspaces
| WS | Icon | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | web-browser |
5 |
| 2 | utilities-terminal |
6 |
| 3 | text-editor |
7 |
| 4 | network-server |
8 |
Workspace 4 uses the same icon as the quickshell drawer's VM tile. Names are generic, so the bar does not lie when the application on a workspace changes.
Colours
This repo holds the bar; udt holds the palette. The palette reaches the bar as
three generated files, all written by this repo's install.sh:
| File | For |
|---|---|
styles/theme.css |
every @name the stylesheets reference |
dots.colors |
the two dot scripts, which are bash and cannot read @define-color |
slackware.svg, slackware-light.svg |
the launcher mark, tinted for each state |
All three are generated, so all three have to be rewritten when the scheme
changes. udt/install.sh calls this script to do that, rather than
copying the stylesheet itself: copying only theme.css recoloured the pills
and left the dots and the mark on the previous scheme.
So a scheme switch is still one command, udt/install.sh, and this script is
what you run after editing the bar. Running it directly regenerates the
palette first; called from udt it skips that, since udt has just done it.
The dot scripts fall back to Macchiato values when dots.colors is missing,
so they still run standalone.
Layout of this repo
config.jsonc entry point; `include`s every module file
modules/ one file per module, by source
styles/ style.css imports the rest in order
icons/ the two icons the icon theme lacks
bin/ wb-icon, wb-lang, and the two dot scripts
Wildcard include has been broken since waybar v0.14.0, so config.jsonc
lists every module file explicitly.
bin/vms_dots.sh and bin/privacy_dots.sh used to live only in ~/bin, in no
repository. They are versioned here now and symlinked back; install.sh keeps
any real file it finds there as .pre-udt first.
Reload
killall -SIGUSR2 waybar
reload_style_on_change is on, so CSS edits apply by themselves.
Visual changes are measured, not reasoned about:
grim -o DP-3 /tmp/shot.png
License
GPLv2 only. See LICENSE.
Development Approach
This project is developed using AI-assisted tools. Code is generated with the help of AI based on human-provided specifications, design decisions, and iterative feedback.
All contributions are reviewed, tested, and curated by the maintainer before being included in the codebase. AI is used as a productivity and exploration tool, while human oversight remains central to all decisions.
The goal is to combine the flexibility of AI-assisted development with standard open-source practices such as transparency, review, and accountability.