Zenith

The lightest beautiful status bar for Wayland.

_{Midnight Bloom on Hyprland, with the wallpaper blurred through the glass. A real capture, not a mock-up.}

Zenith does nothing unless something on the bar changes. No polling helpers, no animations running in the background, a clock that wakes on the minute. And it still looks like the screenshot above: smoked glass, a mint neon accent, one glowing focal element.

It runs on any compositor with wlr-layer-shell: Hyprland (most tested), Sway, niri, river and friends.

Install

paru -S zenith-bar-bin   # prebuilt; or zenith-bar to build from source

Not on Arch? Build from source: GTK 4.22+, gtk4-layer-shell and Rust.

Then start it from your compositor. On Hyprland, with blur for the glass look:

-- hyprland.lua
hl.on("hyprland.start", function() hl.exec_cmd("zenith-bar") end)
hl.layer_rule({ name = "zenith-bar-blur", match = { namespace = "^zenith-bar$" }, blur = true, ignore_alpha = 0.3 })

Still on hyprland.conf, or on Sway, niri or river? Those snippets are in installation.

Configure

No config file is needed: the default is the bar in the screenshot. To make it yours:

zenith-bar init      # writes ~/.config/zenith-bar/config.toml, every default commented

Every key is optional, so a config only holds what you change:

[bar]
position = "bottom"
monitors = ["DP-1"]

[layout]
left = ["logo"]
center = ["clock"]
right = ["media", "system"]

[theme]
name = "tokyo-night"
accent = "#ff79c6"

Save, and the bar updates. A typo keeps the last good config running; zenith-bar check says exactly what's wrong:

config.toml:2:1: unknown key `heigth` in [bar] (did you mean `height`?)

A published JSON Schema gives your editor autocomplete, and gives AI assistants an exact contract.

Presets and themes

Start from a curated look with one command:

zenith-bar init --preset bloom     # floating glass, glowing clock (the default look)
zenith-bar init --preset minimal   # flush, no glow, no motion: the leanest Zenith
zenith-bar init --preset classic   # the Zenith 1.x layout in Tokyo Night

Themes: Midnight Bloom (default), Tokyo Night, Catppuccin Mocha and Gruvbox Dark. Override the accent, opacity or radius in one line, or restyle anything with your own style.css on top of documented --zb-* variables and zb-* classes.

Gallery

Every shot below is the same bar over the same wallpaper on Hyprland, changed only by config. The glass bars let the compositor's blur through; minimal is flush and opaque on purpose.

Midnight Bloom (default)

Tokyo Night: [theme] name = "tokyo-night"

Catppuccin Mocha: [theme] name = "catppuccin-mocha"

Gruvbox Dark: [theme] name = "gruvbox-dark"

Your own accent: [theme] accent = "#ff79c6", one line on top of any theme

Preset minimal: flush to the edge, no glow, no motion

Preset classic: the Zenith 1.x layout, reborn in Tokyo Night

Where it started: Zenith 1.x

The original bar, for the record. v2 is a clean rewrite of this look, at a fraction of the cost (see Numbers).

Numbers

Measured by the benchmark harness in a headless Sway (gles2 renderer) on one laptop (Intel Core i7-13700HX, Arch Linux, GTK 4.24.1), median of three runs, 30 s idle window:

	Zenith 1.x	Zenith 2, bloom	Zenith 2, minimal
Idle CPU	17.132 %	0.000 %	0.000 %
Wakeups	196.55 /s	1.23 /s	0.27 /s
Time to first frame	281 ms	194 ms	189 ms
Proportional memory (PSS)	92.9 MiB	58.4 MiB	58.1 MiB

Resident memory is 145.6 MiB for bloom, most of it shared GTK, font and GPU driver mappings, and it moves with the machine's page cache: read performance before quoting it. CI holds every preset to its performance budgets on every code change.

Docs

• Installation: AUR, source build, Hyprland, Sway, niri and river notes
• Configuration: every key with its default and an example
• Theming: themes, motion, the focal element, every variable and class
• Performance: method, hardware and full results
• Migrating from 1.x: v2 is a clean break; start here
• Contributing and the changelog

License

MIT © Swastik Patel