dwm-anybar is a patch for dwm that enables dwm to manage external status bars such as lemonbar and polybar. Dwm treats the external bar as it would its own, so all regular dwm commands such as togglebar affect the external bar in the same way.

This patch has no additional requirements beyond regular dwm.

The patch can be found on the Releases page. Download the latest version of the patch that matches your version of dwm.

Update patches can also be found on the same page which can be applied on top of previous anybar patches to fix bugs, improve compatability, etc.

static const int showbar       = 1;          /* 0 means no bar */
static const int topbar        = 1;          /* 0 means bottom bar */
static const int usealtbar     = 1;          /* 1 means use non-dwm status bar */
static const char *altbarclass = "Polybar";  /* Alternate bar class name */
static const char *altbarcmd   = "$HOME/bar.sh"; /* Alternate bar launch command */

showbar and topbar affect the external status bar as it would dwm's status bar. showbar must be 1 to show the external bar. topbar must be set appropriately as well based on if the external bar is docked at the bottom or the top of the screen. The patch only supports bars docked at the top/bottom of the monitor.

usealtbar must be set to 1 to use an external status bar, otherwise dwm's own bar will be enabled.

altbarclass must be set to the class name of the external status bar for dwm to differentiate it from regular windows. The class name of the bar can be found using xprop

xprop(1):
 WM_CLASS(STRING) = instance, class
                              ^^^^^
                              altbarclass should be set to this
 WM_NAME(STRING) = title

altbarcmd can be set to the path to a script that launches your bar. This script should launch the bar in the background (i.e. with an & after the launch command in the script), otherwise dwm will keep waiting for the launch script to end and freeze. Environment variables are supported. This method to starting your bar is preferred since it ensures that the bar launches once dwm is ready rather than launching too early. Make sure this script checks for running bars before launching, else restarting dwm will cause duplicate bars. One way to do this would be to add something like this at the beginning of your script:

if pgrep '^polybar' > /dev/null; then
  exit 0
fi

If the patch is in some way incompatible with any other patches, feel free to create an issue.

The anybar patch has been successfully applied together with the following patches:

• activetagindicatorbar
• cfacts
• combo
• emptyview
• ewmhtags
• fullgaps
• gaplessgrid
• hide-vacant-tags
• ipc
• movestack
• pertag
• restartsig
• scratchpad
• statuspadding (merge conflict, but solveable)
• sticky
• swallow
• title color
• viewontag
• warp
• xrdb

Since polybar's tray is handled as a separate window and is populated slowly, it is difficult to manage. There is a polybar-tray-fix version of the patch that allows dwm to manage the tray. The tray isn't actually managed until the togglebar command is called, but it fixes the issue where toggling the bar would not hide the tray.

This version of the patch adds alttrayname to config.def.h which is already set to the correct value.

See dwm-ipc

See polybar-dwm-module