This is a system status bar meant for use with window managers like XMonad. It is similar to xmobar, but with more visual flare and a different widget set. Contributed widgets are more than welcome. The bar is drawn using gtk and cairo. It is actually the simplest possible thing that could plausibly work: you give Taffybar a list of GTK widgets and it will render them in a horizontal bar for you (taking care of ugly details like reserving strut space so that window managers don't put windows over it).

This is the real main module. The default bar should be customized to taste in the config file (~.configtaffybar/taffybar.hs). Typically, this means adding widgets to the default config. A default configuration file is included in the distribution, but the essentials are covered here.

The config file is just a Haskell source file that is compiled at startup (if it has changed) to produce a custom executable with the desired set of widgets. You will want to import this module along with the modules of any widgets you want to add to the bar. Note, you can define any widgets that you want in your config file or other libraries. Taffybar only cares that you give it some GTK widgets to display.

Below is a fairly typical example:

import System.Taffybar
import System.Taffybar.SimpleConfig
import System.Taffybar.Widget
import System.Taffybar.Information.CPU

cpuCallback = do
  (_, systemLoad, totalLoad) <- cpuLoad
  return [ totalLoad, systemLoad ]

main = do
  let cpuCfg = defaultGraphConfig { graphDataColors = [ (0, 1, 0, 1), (1, 0, 1, 0.5)]
                                  , graphLabel = Just "cpu"
                                  }
      clock = textClockNew Nothing "<span fgcolor='orange'>%a %b %_d %H:%M</span>" 1
      cpu = pollingGraphNew cpuCfg 0.5 cpuCallback
      workspaces = workspacesNew defaultWorkspacesConfig
      simpleConfig = defaultSimpleTaffyConfig
                       { startWidgets = [ workspaces ]
                       , endWidgets = [ sniTrayNew, clock, cpu ]
                       }
  simpleTaffybar simpleConfig

This configuration creates a bar with four widgets. On the left is a widget that shows information about the workspace configuration. The rightmost widget is the system tray, with a clock and then a CPU graph. The clock is formatted using standard strftime-style format strings (see the clock module). Note that the clock is colored using Pango markup (again, see the clock module).

The CPU widget plots two graphs on the same widget: total CPU use in green and then system CPU use in a kind of semi-transparent purple on top of the green.

It is important to note that the widget lists are *not* [Widget]. They are actually [TaffyIO Widget] since the bar needs to construct them after performing some GTK initialization.

• * A note about taffybar's dependency on DBus: |
• If you start your window manager using a graphical login manager like gdm or kdm, DBus should be started automatically for you.
• If you start xmonad with a different graphical login manager that does not start DBus for you automatically, put the line @eval `dbus-launch
• -auto-syntax`@ into your ~/.xsession *before* xmonad and taffybar are started. This command sets some environment variables that the two must agree on.
• If you start xmonad via startx or a similar command, add the above command to ~/.xinitrc

While taffybar is based on GTK+, it ignores your GTK+ theme. The default theme that it uses lives at https://github.com/taffybar/taffybar/blob/master/taffybar.css You can alter this theme by editing ~/.config/taffybar/taffybar.css to your liking. For an idea of the customizations you can make, see https://live.gnome.org/GnomeArt/Tutorials/GtkThemes.