[!WARNING] This project is in a very early beta stage.

The system is undergoing constant changes and may contain serious bugs, performance issues, or memory leaks.

Use it with caution and expect instability.

I’m currently working on three “ice” projects simultaneously—there’s only so much I can realistically handle at once.

❄️ Icebar

Icebar is a lightweight, Wayland status bar written in Rust, powered by iced and iced-layer-shell.

It aims to provide a minimal, fast, and hackable bar/popup system designed for wlroots and smithay compositors (Hyprland, Sway, Niri, etc.), with dynamic tray integration and interactive popups.

Built for people who want full control instead of heavyweight desktop panels.

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🖼️ Showcase

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✨ Features

• 🧊 Native Wayland layer-shell bar
• ⚡ Written entirely in Rust
• 🎨 UI powered by iced
• 🖱 Interactive popups
• 🔔 Status Notifier / system tray support (DBusMenu)
• 📍 Cursor-aware popup positioning
• 🧩 Modular architecture (easy to extend)
• 🪶 Lightweight and compositor-friendly

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🧠 What Icebar Does

Icebar is not a traditional desktop environment panel.

Instead, it acts as a:

• Wayland layer-shell surface
• Tray watcher (StatusNotifierItem)
• Popup/menu renderer
• Event-driven UI application

Core responsibilities

• listens for tray applications via DBus
• renders tray items inside a bar
• opens contextual menus as popups
• communicates directly with Wayland outputs
• dynamically positions UI relative to cursor/output

Conceptually:

Tray Apps ──DBus──▶ Icebar Core
│
▼
iced UI Renderer
│
▼
Wayland Layer Surface

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🖥 Supported Environments

Icebar targets smithay and wlroots based compositors, including:

• Hyprland
• Sway
• Niri
• Others layer-shell compatible compositors

X11 is not supported.

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📦 Tech Stack

• Rust
• iced (GUI framework)
• iced_layershell
• zbus (DBus communication)
• Wayland layer-shell protocol
• libpulse (Volume Data Fetcher)
• wpctl (Volume Action handling)

⚠️ Audio stack note: Icebar reads volume data via libpulse (PulseAudio) but controls volume via wpctl (PipeWire/WirePlumber). On systems running pure PipeWire without the PulseAudio compatibility layer, the volume display will not update even though scroll and mute controls work fine. To fix this, install pipewire-pulse (the package name may vary by distro), which provides the PulseAudio interface on top of PipeWire.

iced provides a declarative UI model inspired by Elm architecture.

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🚀 Installation

AUR (Recommended):

paru -S icebar-git

or

yay -S icebar-git

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Building From Source:

Requirements for building:

• Rust/Cargo (stable/2024)
• libpulse (or "libpulse-dev")
• gcc-libs
• libxrandr
• libxcb

⚠️ Runtime requirement: pipewire-pulse must be installed for volume monitoring to work on PipeWire systems. See the audio stack note in the Tech Stack section above.

Build And Install With:

git clone https://github.com/HaruNashii/Icebar
cd Icebar
cargo build --release
mkdir -p $HOME/.local/bin
cp -rf target/release/icebar $HOME/.local/bin/

Tip: Run it from your compositor autostart for best results.

• Example (Hyprland):

exec-once = icebar

• Example (Sway):

bar {
    swaybar_command icebar
}

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🎨 Theme Switcher

Icebar includes a bash script that lets you manage and apply themes from a collection of preset configurations.

Folder Structure

Place your themes in a folder called themes next to the script. Each theme must be a subdirectory containing a config.ron file:

icebar-theme-switcher.sh
themes/
├── dracula/
│   └── config.ron
├── nord/
│   └── config.ron
└── catppuccin-mocha/
    └── config.ron

Usage

chmod +x icebar-theme-switcher.sh
./icebar-theme-switcher.sh

The script will:

1. Scan ./themes/ and list every valid theme (subdirectories that contain a config.ron)
2. Prompt you to pick a theme by number, or press q to quit without making any changes
3. Check for an existing config at ~/.config/icebar/config.ron and offer two options if one is found:
   • Backup — renames the existing config to config.ron.backup_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS before installing the new one, so nothing is lost
   • Overwrite — replaces the current config permanently; requires a second confirmation (yes) before proceeding
4. Copy the chosen theme's config.ron to ~/.config/icebar/config.ron

After the script finishes, restart Icebar to apply the new theme.

Note: The script creates ~/.config/icebar/ automatically if it does not exist yet.

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🧩 Architecture Overview

src/
├── main.rs             → application entry point
├── subscription.rs     → iced subscriptions
├── update.rs           → iced message handler
├── view.rs             → iced renderer handler
├── ron.rs              → ron configuration handler
├── tray.rs             → StatusNotifier watcher
├── context_menu.rs     → context menu UI + logic
├── modules/            → bar components
├── helpers/            → small helpers

Key Systems

1. Layer Shell Integration

• Creates anchored Wayland surfaces without a desktop environment.

2. Tray Watcher

• Uses DBus to detect and interact with tray applications.

3. Popup Engine

• Menus are rendered as independent iced views that can:
  • follow cursor position
  • anchor to outputs
  • react to clicks outside the window

4. Event Model

• Icebar follows iced's update/view architecture:
  • Message → Update → State → View

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🎯 Project Goals

Icebar focuses on:

• simplicity over feature bloat
• hackability
• learning modern Wayland APIs
• experimenting with iced + layer-shell
• This is intentionally closer to a framework for a bar than a finished desktop panel.

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⚠️ Current Status

Experimental / Work in Progress Expect:

• breaking changes
• incomplete modules
• rapid iteration

The project is primarily a learning and experimentation platform.

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🪲 Known Bugs

• Icebar crashing on Gnome.
  • Explanation: Icebar depend on Layer Shell which Gnome doesn't implemented yet!!!
• Context menu not closing when clicking outside the window on Niri
• Bar size not working on Niri

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🛠 Roadmap (Planned Ideas)

• Plugin/modules API For Custom Modules
• Better tray icon handling
• Animations (very low priority right now)

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🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome!!! Good areas to help:

• Wayland handling
• iced widgets
• tray compatibility
• performance improvements
• compositor testing
• architecture improvements

Steps:

  fork → branch → commit → pull request

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❤️ Contributors

• My Wife Lottie (told me that my project sucks, so I had to make it better)

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📸 Screenshots

(Accepting screenshots to display here, if you have one and want to share, i would appreciate it)

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📜 License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

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