A clean, floating top bar for the niri desktop. Everything sits in small rounded "pills" that can follow your wallpaper's colors.

• Workspaces and the name of the window you're using
• An app launcher built into the bar: apps, open windows, a calculator, clipboard history and power actions, in a card that drops out of the launcher pill
• Quick settings: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth (with your paired devices), Do Not Disturb, night light, microphone mute, screen brightness and microphone input volume sliders, and power profile
• A month calendar and a five-day weather forecast under the clock and weather pills
• A small volume or brightness pop-up whenever the volume or screen brightness changes
• Date, time and current weather (condition icon + temperature, no API key needed)
• What's playing, with an expanded media player card (album art, track progress/seek bar, previous / play-pause / next, and a player switcher) on left-click, or quick play/pause on right/middle-click
• Pending Arch/Pacman/AUR package updates (󰏗 <count>), with a click to update in your terminal
• Active XKB keyboard layout indicator (󰌌 US, JP, …) from niri, with a click or scroll to switch
• System battery status with charging state and low-battery warnings (hidden on desktops without a battery)
• Microphone input status and mute pill (󰍬 / 󰍭) alongside output volume
• CPU and memory at a glance
• Wi-Fi, volume, notifications and a power button
• A system tray with proper right-click menus
• A Tern pill that shows how many Tern windows are open, and opens a terminal tab in one — or a new window when none is open (only if you use Tern)
• A wallpaper picker and colour controls, in the same window as the layout editor
• An optional little desktop pet — needs the tern-poke plugin for Tern (not released yet)

You'll need Quickshell 0.3 or newer, niri, and the JetBrainsMono Nerd Font.

git clone https://github.com/Tsukabe-Admin/tern-bar ~/.config/quickshell/tern-bar
quickshell -c tern-bar

To start it every time you log in, and to make the settings window float, add this to your niri config (~/.config/niri/config.kdl):

spawn-at-startup "quickshell" "-c" "tern-bar"

window-rule {
    match title="^tern-bar settings$"
    match title="^Wallpaper folder$"
    open-floating true
}

binds {
    Mod+B { spawn "quickshell" "ipc" "-c" "tern-bar" "call" "settings" "toggle"; }
    Mod+W { spawn "quickshell" "ipc" "-c" "tern-bar" "call" "settings" "wallpaper"; }
    Mod+Space { spawn "quickshell" "ipc" "-c" "tern-bar" "call" "launcher" "toggle"; }
    Mod+V { spawn "quickshell" "ipc" "-c" "tern-bar" "call" "launcher" "clipboard"; }
    Mod+Return { spawn "quickshell" "ipc" "-c" "tern-bar" "call" "tern" "open"; }
}

(If you already have a binds { } block, put those lines inside it instead. Other things a key can call: launcher power, launcher close, bar calendar, bar media, bar quickSettings, bar close, tern open.)

Edit any file and the bar updates on the spot. Your own settings are saved in ~/.config/tern-bar/, never inside this folder, so git pull is always safe.

Each one is only needed for the part it powers; the rest of the bar works without it.

The settings page has two tabs: Layout (see Make it yours) and Wallpaper. The Wallpaper tab is a thumbnail grid of your wallpaper folder (~/Pictures/Wallpapers until you pick another) — search, favourites, shuffle and automatic rotation — plus a per-screen choice (one image everywhere, or a single screen with its own), fill mode and edge colour, animated transitions, and the colour controls below. Wallpapers are drawn by awww; the bar starts it when needed and puts your wallpaper back every time it starts. Until you pick one, the bar leaves your desktop's wallpaper alone.

Everything the tab does is two scripts in scripts/: wallpaper.sh puts an image on screen and theme-sync.sh recolours. Your choices are saved in ~/.config/tern-bar/wallpaper.json; the bar is its only writer.

With "Colours from wallpaper" on (and matugen installed), the bar takes its colours from the All screens image, using the Material scheme and contrast you pick. Without a wallpaper or matugen, it keeps its built-in dark blue colours. The bar always uses the dark variant, whatever the wallpaper. Warning and OK colours stay yellow and green so they keep their meaning.

If you already use matugen for other apps, nothing extra is needed: the same run also renders the templates in your ~/.config/matugen/config.toml.

Turn "Colours from wallpaper" off and the bar is painted from one of ten presets — Catppuccin Mocha, Tokyo Night, Nord, Gruvbox Dark, Dracula, Rosé Pine, Everforest Dark, Kanagawa Wave, One Dark, Solarized Dark — listed in themes/presets.json. They don't need matugen. Changing the wallpaper then leaves the colours alone. If matugen is installed, your matugen templates follow the preset too.

After every recolour, theme-sync.sh runs ~/.config/tern-bar/theme-hook.sh if it exists and is executable, as theme-hook.sh <colors.json> <label>. colors.json holds every Material colour role in matugen's format (.colors.primary.default.color, …), and <label> is the theme's name or the wallpaper's file name. Use it to reload apps that don't notice new colours on their own, for example pkill -SIGUSR1 kitty.

If you'd rather run matugen yourself (from another wallpaper tool), add this to ~/.config/matugen/config.toml and don't use the Wallpaper tab's colour switch:

[templates.tern-bar]
input_path = "~/.config/quickshell/tern-bar/matugen/palette.json"
output_path = "~/.local/state/tern-bar/palette.json"

The bar watches that file and fades to the new colours. To change which Material You colour feeds which part of the bar, edit matugen/palette.json.

• Sizes and the fallback colors: singletons/Theme.qml
• Rearrange the bar: open the settings page — the gear in the tools pill, a right-click on the launcher, or Mod+B — then drag a pill to another group or click it to show/hide it. Every change lands in ~/.config/tern-bar/bar.json, and the page applies to all screens at once. Right-clicking the Tern pill still hops it straight to the next group. Any other key can call the same thing: quickshell ipc -c tern-bar call settings toggle (also open / close).
• Wallpaper: Mod+W, or the wallpaper button in the tools pill, opens the settings page straight on its Wallpaper tab — quickshell ipc -c tern-bar call settings wallpaper does the same, and pressing it again closes the page.
• Launch animation: there's a fancy "grow into a new window" effect. It's off by default. Turn it on with morphEnabled in singletons/BarConfig.qml, but don't run it in a loop.
• Keybinding cheat sheet: the ? button in the tools pill shows niri's built-in hotkey overlay.
• Launcher: click the launcher pill (or Mod+Space). Type to search apps and open windows; type a sum like 2*(3+4) to see the answer (Enter copies it); start with ; to search clipboard history. Up/Down pick, Enter opens, Esc clears and then closes. Apps you open often move to the top (counts in ~/.local/state/tern-bar/launcher.json). The ⏻ button opens the power actions; Log out, Reboot and Power off need a second Enter.
• Quick settings: the sliders button in the right-hand pill. Calendar: click the clock.
• Your IP stays hidden: the network pill shows only the Wi-Fi name until you click it; click again to hide the IP. The choice is the file ~/.local/state/tern-bar/show_ip.
• Weather lookup: the weather pill is on by default and asks a geolocation service (ipwho.is, or wttr.in) where you are, then fetches the forecast from Open-Meteo — no API key, but your IP is sent. Set TERN_BAR_WEATHER_LOCATION="City" or TERN_BAR_WEATHER_COORDS="lat,lon" in the bar's environment to skip the IP lookup.
• Tray menus close when you click anywhere else.

shell.qml        starts the bar on every screen
components/      the bar and each of its pills
singletons/      shared pieces: theme, settings, wallpaper, niri connection
scripts/         helpers: wallpaper, colours, network status, IP hiding
themes/          the ten built-in colour themes
matugen/         an optional template, for driving the colours from your own matugen setup
screenshots/     pictures for this page

To restart it by hand:

quickshell kill -c tern-bar
NIRI_SOCKET=$(ls /run/user/$UID/niri.wayland-1.*.sock) quickshell -c tern-bar --daemonize

Without NIRI_SOCKET the bar still starts, but workspaces and the window name stay empty.

This bar is an experiment in vibecoding — building software by describing what you want to an AI coding agent and iterating on what it produces. The code here was mostly written by Claude Code and OMP while I described the behaviour, tested it on the live desktop and decided what shipped. It is a new way to work, and I wanted to see how far it can go: not a toy demo, but a daily-driver bar with a launcher, settings, wallpaper tools, weather, media controls and the rest.

It runs every day on my machine (Arch, niri, Quickshell 0.3.2). It has not been tested on every distro, GPU or Quickshell version, so treat it as a working experiment rather than a finished product. The parts that matter were checked on the live desktop, not only compiled.

Bug reports, ideas, pull requests and questions are welcome — especially from people who know QML or Quickshell better than I do. Screenshots of odd behaviour are just as useful as patches. I am happy to help with this project or any other; open an issue or say hello. See CONTRIBUTING.md for what is useful in a report or a PR.

MIT. See LICENSE.