cbar

Cbar is an opinionated GTK4 desktop panel for Wayland, written in Rust. It is derived from Ironbar and integrates three pieces that benefit from sharing one resident process:

• a configurable layer-shell bar;
• an offline-first application launcher; and
• native Cairo system and network graphs.

The notification daemon, OSD, lock screen, polkit agent, portals, and compositor remain separate replaceable processes.

Compositors

Cbar has typed adapters for Scroll/Sway, niri, Hyprland, and i3-compatible runtimes. Scroll is detected directly through SCROLLSOCK; no IPC proxy or payload-rewriting service is required. A missing compositor capability disables only the module that consumes it.

Configuration

Cbar keeps Ironbar's bar configuration model as a directly maintained source superset. Existing supported bar configuration can therefore be migrated by moving it into Cbar's own namespace; Cbar does not install legacy paths or binary aliases.

The default files are:

~/.config/cbar/config.{corn,json,toml,yaml}
~/.config/cbar/style.css
~/.config/cbar/launcher.json

CBAR_CONFIG, CBAR_CSS, and CBAR_LAUNCHER_CONFIG override those locations. The launcher schema and mutable launcher state are separate fault domains, so a bad launcher configuration cannot prevent a valid bar from starting.

Open the launcher with:

cbar launcher show

Other control commands are available through cbar --help.

Building

Build the complete feature set with Cargo:

cargo build --release --all-features --locked

Or build the Nix package:

nix build .#cbar

The release gate validates every supported feature combination and then runs a real headless layer-shell session:

checks/release-matrix.sh wtype -- sway -c '{config}'

See checks/README.md for the measured startup, memory, idle, and redraw contracts. See docs/Cbar architecture.md for ownership and failure boundaries.

Upstream and license

Cbar is licensed under FSL-1.1-ALv2. Each version automatically becomes available under Apache-2.0 two years after it is made available. The fork started from Ironbar commit 5b96bcffac54dd82347badcc07f79d58efa715c7; the integrated launcher came from nixlaunch commit 8168771811a225448d682113379f91ef1373e7ae. Those inherited components retain their MIT grants and notices. Exact provenance and the upstream update policy are recorded in UPSTREAM.md, NOTICE, and LICENSES.