Okay, I am super new to tiling windows managers, and let me just say - Sway made me an instant convert. I’m obsessed. But I still have no clue what I’m doing.

So I have been trying out every status bar I can to see what looks good, what feels good, and what has the best efficiency for some of my SUPER low-grade hardware.

This brings me to yambar. It is touted as the most resource efficient status bars, and because I only want to see a few things (battery, ram, cpu, volume, time/date), I figured it was a good fit. I downloaded and installed it (used AUR) and I had a few issues getting it installed, but eventually go there. (I should probably say right now that I’m also new to Arch. All my previous Linux experience has been Debian based.)

So now that yambar is installed, I snagged the example config.yaml and moved/renamed it to ~/.config/yambar/config.yaml. Now most of the previous status bars I’ve been trying required you to add/change something in the ~/.config/sway/config to make them go. usually in between some bar:{status_command }. So I went ahead and tried to add status_command /usr/bin/yambar in there, and I just got errors.

I’ve read the documentation on yambar’s codeberg like 100 times, and there isn’t anything in there about how to actually activate this darn bar. I’m guessing I’m missing something totally noob.

Help?

(ps- love the community. Subscribed immediately.)

  • NeonWoofGenesisA
    3·
    5 months ago

    I installed yambar to check it out. I had to name the config ´config.yml´ and not ´config.yaml´ which you have. With that I could launch it from the terminal.

    However I couldn’t make it launch from sway by swapping out my ´waybar´ to ´yambar´, so I can’t help you there from my quick test. This is my section for the bar in ´~/.config/sway/config`

    bar {
    id default
    position top
    swaybar_command waybar
}

    Go and see if you can even launch it from the terminal first.

    edit: Got curious by your mentioned status_command

    With that yambar shows up, but also the default swaybar. I could hide it with:

    bar {
    id default
    position top
    mode hide
    status_command yambar
}
    • Nimrod@lemm.eeOP
      3·
      5 months ago

      Thanks for the quick reply! (and for going out of your way to help). I renamed the YAML file, and tried to run it from the terminal and it threw some errors (missing dependencies for some of the content in that example YAML. I installed those dependencies just to see if it would show up, and it did! All the icons are broken (guessing that’s a font thing?) and a few of the bits/bobs aren’t working properly, but it runs!

      Thank you so much. I will now begin the fun task of tweaking (AKA breaking it, fixing it, and breaking it) until it fits my needs.

      It’s definitely not as pretty as bumblebee-status! But if it’s lighter on resources, than it’s a win. I guess I’ll have to test that somehow…

    • Nimrod@lemm.eeOP
      2·
      5 months ago

      EDIT: I am dumb, and just needed to download the font to my system. Please ignore

      Heyyo, me again. I have been tweaking with the Yambar for a little while now, and I thought I was getting somewhere, but now I have a different issue, and I can’t seem to get the proper terms to google. Again, I think I’m missing something basic.
      It’s the emojis, why can’t I see them? I can’t see them online in people’s example dotfiles, I cant see them in vim (I imagine this is intentional?) And I surely can’t see them in my status bar. It’s driving me crazy. I really want to have a super minimal, lightweight bar, but I don’t want it cluttered with all sorts of text!

      Thanks again,