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What is awob?

awob is Another Wayland Overlay Bar — a small, fast on-screen-display daemon for Wayland. When you press a volume key, change brightness, mute the mic, or your battery dips into the red, awob is the slim ribbon that appears on screen, shows the current value, and quietly fades out.

It is a spiritual successor and drop-in replacement for the excellent wob by Francesco Mariani. If wob covers what you need, use wob — it's tiny, fast, battle-tested, and shaped exactly right for what it does. awob owes its name and FIFO format to wob.

Why awob exists​

Three things wob doesn't do that some users want:

  • Richer theming. awob themes are KDL files describing a small scene tree (rect / text / image / bar) with bindings, an expression language, palette imports, and a transition timeline. See Themes for the full reference.
  • Typed IPC. A Unix socket speaking JSON-lines instead of a one-way FIFO. Listeners send structured events with event, value, source, style, icon, etc. — easier to integrate with than parsing wob's positional <value> [<style>] lines. See Protocol.
  • An event-source listener ecosystem. PipeWire, sysfs battery, sysfs backlight, keyboard backlight — auto-discovered and supervised. Plug in your own listener via the same socket protocol.

What awob doesn't try to be​

  • Cross-platform. awob is Wayland-only. No X11, no macOS, no Windows. The renderer assumes wlr-layer-shell-v1.
  • A notification daemon. OSDs and notification bubbles are different things. awob is the OSD; pair it with mako / dunst / swaync for notifications.
  • Tiny. wob is ~25 KB stripped; awob's daemon is ~4.5 MB. That's the cost of cosmic-text + tiny-skia + resvg + the listener supervisor. If a 5 MB daemon offends you, use wob.

Status​

Pre-1.0. Wire format and theme schema may still change without a deprecation cycle until 0.1.0. Pin a version in scripts.

Where next​

  • Install — distro packages, building from source, the systemd user unit.
  • Quick start — get the OSD on screen and drive it from a script in five minutes.
  • Migrating from wob — keep your existing FIFO scripts working while gaining the rest of the ecosystem.
  • Themes — write your own theme.
  • Protocol — write your own listener or driver.