waybar: custom module to help you refocus

Couple of months ago when I read the post How I hacked my clock to control my focus by Marc Päpper, It quickly became a daily driver for me. This small hack using a shell script helped me to get back to work quickly when ever I get distracted.

I quickly realized that I needed something comparable with waybar after moving to Hyprland.

Custom Module

I want the module to be dead simple and use only the basic unix tools I already have. Hence, I decided to store the text in a separate file and read the contents to display on waybar.

That way I can ignore the file from my dotfiles and update the text easily without any parsing overhead.

{ 
   "custom/focus": {
      "format": "<span color='#ff6699'><b> Focus: {}</b></span>",
      "exec": "cat ~/.config/waybar/.focus",
      "signal":8,
   }
}

Create a script named waybar-focus.sh with the below content.

#!/bin/bash
set -e -o pipefail

# Set focus text from command line argument or prompt user
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
  echo "What's your current focus?"
  read FOCUS
else
  FOCUS="$1"
fi

if [ -z "$FOCUS" ]; then
  echo -e "" > ~/.config/waybar/.focus 
else
  echo -e "Focus: $FOCUS" > ~/.config/waybar/.focus 
  notify-send "Focus: $FOCUS"
fi

pkill -SIGRTMIN+8 waybar

echo "Focus set to: $FOCUS"

You can make this file executable and add to $PATH. This is an adapted version of Marc Päpper’s focus.sh.

Update custom module using signal

In the initial version of the script, I was using killall -SIGUSR2 waybar to restart the waybar after the update. Soon I realized this is overkill and started looking for ways I can update the module without killing and respawning waybar.

Since module content is always updated manually, watching the file or using interval config seems overkill as well. Then I found the signal option in the config for custom modules

The signal number used to update the module. The number is valid between 1 and N, where SIGRTMIN+N = SIGRTMAX.

In the above module config we use "signal":8, and in the script we use

pkill -SIGRTMIN+8 waybar

This way the latest entry will show up on the waybar instantly and without any overhead of watching the file or polling.

Hope this is helpful.

Versions of Language/packages used in this post.