FAQ

• How do I add multiple instances of a module?
• The Workspace-Buttons have a strange hover effect
• How can I generate a debug build?
• The icons from the default configuration aren't rendered
• How do I display text?
• How can I prevent modules from changing size?
• How to use with Sway?
• How can I temporarily hide the bars?
• How can I reload the configuration without restarting waybar?
• Workspace buttons are too wide with some GTK themes

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How do I add multiple instances of a module?

Have a look here: Multiple instances of a module

The Workspace-Buttons have a strange hover effect

It's not a bug, the original issue #60.

But if you don't like the effect you can disable it by adding the following snippet to your style.css:

#workspaces button:hover {
    box-shadow: inherit;
    text-shadow: inherit;
}

Additionally, to remove all hover effects from workspaces, add the following in addition to the above:

#workspaces button:hover {
    background: <original-color>;
    border: <original-color>;
    padding: 0 3px;
}

How can I generate a debug build?

A debug build can be helpfull when fixing bugs, because it generates a backtrace with debugging symbols.

This can be done with:

make build-debug

The icons from the default configuration aren't rendered

You need to install otf-font-awesome. See here on how to install the Font Awesome OTF package.

How do I display text?

Create a Custom module with the format field specified with your text.

How can I prevent modules from changing size? (aka. fixed-width modules, and monospace fonts)

First make sure to set a monospace font:

* {
    font-family: monospace;
}

Then change the module format so that it stays at a fixed width. Waybar uses fmt for formatting so the following syntax is an example of how to set the CPU percentage to be at least 2 characters wide:

"format": "{usage:2}%"

The fmt library has two issues. First it provides no way to set the maximum length of a field, only the minimum length. So expect width changes when the text becomes longer than the minimum width. This can be partially worked around with the max-lengthparameter. See https://github.com/Alexays/Waybar/issues/486.

The second issue concerns floating point numbers. Waybar comes with a custom formatter that enforces a fixed width for them (network bandwidth, disk usage, etc). You need to specify either >, <, or = as format modifier. This will align the number as requested and make it fixed width. See https://github.com/Alexays/Waybar/pull/472 for details, examples and limitations.

A last but painful issue arises with pango/cairo font rendering for custom glyphs (Font Awesome icons, most probably). Cairo keeps the font used for the last non-whitespace character to render the next whitespaces. This means that the two next lines, despite containing the same number of characters, will not render with the same width.

         10 spaces
  2 leading spaces

You can either move all your icons at the end of the module, so that they have no following spaces to alter, or use pango-specific markup around all the icons, like this: <span font=\"Font Awesome 5 Free\"></span>. This forces cairo to return to the default font when leaving the <span> and avoids using spaces of the wrong kind. You may experience improvements as https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/-/issues/249 seems to work against that.

How to use with Sway?

You can use Waybar by defining in your Sway config file:

bar {
    swaybar_command waybar
}

or at the end of your sway config file

exec waybar

How can I temporarily hide the bars?

You can toggle the visibility of the bars with:

killall -SIGUSR1 waybar

How can I reload the configuration without restarting waybar?

Only works on waybar after version v0.9.5

killall -SIGUSR2 waybar

Workspace buttons are too wide with some GTK themes

In certain GTK themes, the button.text-button.flat element's min-width property is assigned a large value. You can override it in waybar's style.css

#workspaces button {
  min-width: 20px;
}