Taffybar


Taffybar is a gtk+3 (through gi-gtk) based desktop information bar, intended primarily for use with XMonad, though it can also function alongside other EWMH compliant window managers. It is similar in spirit to xmobar, but it differs in that it gives up some simplicity for a reasonable helping of eye candy.

Prerequisites

Taffybar has a number of non-haskell dependencies. It is recommended that you follow the installation instructions for haskell-gi before attempting to install taffybar.

In addition the the dependencies needed by haskell-gi, taffybar also needs the equivalent of libdbusmenu-gtk3-dev and libgirepository1.0-dev on Debian.

Installation

Taffybar itself can be installed in a number of different ways:

Stack

Though it is admittedly a bit complicated to set up properly, using stack is the preferred approach for installing taffybar, because it makes the build process stable and repeatable. Even if you are unfamiliar with stack, or even haskell in general, you should be able to get things working by using the taffybar's quick-start script:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/taffybar/taffybar/master/quick-start.sh | bash

This script will clone the taffybar repository into a subdirectory of the default taffybar configuration directory, and copy the example cabal, stack and taffybar.hs files into the same location. It will then install a binary my-taffybar to $HOME/.local/bin, which can be executed to run taffybar. Note that with this approach, running the taffybar binary WILL NOT work; you must run the binary that is produced by the stack build in your local directory. The name of the binary can be changed in the cabal file in the taffybar configuration directory.

Running with stack

When you build with stack, it is recommended that you start taffybar with startTaffybar rather than dyreTaffybar, and use https://github.com/yamadapc/stack-run to execute the custom executable specified by your cabal and stack files. The maintainers have plans for a better solution (that does not require the user to use stack-run themselves) in #158.

Cabal

Cabal installation is a simple matter of installing taffybar from hackage:

cabal install taffybar

Configuration

Like xmobar and XMonad, taffybar is configured in haskell. Taffybar depends on dyre to automatically detect changes to its configuration file ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME/taffybar/taffybar.hs) and recompile when appropriate.

For more details about how to configure taffybar, see the full documentation. You can find a list of available widgets here

Contributing

Taffybar desperately needs contributors. If you want to help, but don't know where to get started you can check out our "help wanted" and "easy" labels: