xerotop

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a battery-conscious system monitor for wayland.

A vertical xerotop bar: clock with power/lock icons, CPU/MEM/GPU/DISK/NET graphs, a sensors block (CPU/GPU/SSD temps + fan RPM), uptime with load averages, weather, keyboard LEDs, volume and brightness meters, a top-processes list, the window taskbar and the system tray.

A gkrellm-style system monitor for Wayland (wlroots / layer-shell), in Rust + GTK4. A vertical (or horizontal) stack of live meters — CPU & per-core, memory, GPU, disk, network, temps/fans, battery, volume, brightness, top processes, uptime, keyboard LEDs, weather, mail — plus a real taskbar and system tray, all in one process with zero subprocesses.

It's the successor to an ewwii-based bar that spawned ~600 shell processes per second to poll metrics. xerotop reads /proc, /sys, ALSA and statvfs natively and redraws only when new data arrives.

design principles

battery-first. one scheduler, one timer; on battery every interval stretches by a configurable multiplier. with stepped graphs there are no extra wakeups; the default smooth scrolling animates via a frame clock (toggle off for minimal wakeups).
single process. metrics, taskbar (wlr-foreign-toplevel), tray (StatusNotifier) and weather — no IPC, no sockets, no helper daemons.
worse-is-better. the smallest thing that genuinely works, then iterate.
configure by prefs, not a config language. plain, stable TOML, boring on purpose, never rug-pulled.
orientation-agnostic. vertical and horizontal bars share one layout model.

what's in it

layer-shell bar on any edge — thickness, length (full / fixed), alignment, stacking layer, monitor, opacity
meters: CPU, per-core mini-bars, MEM, GPU, DISK (usage bar + I/O graphs), NET — ewwii-style dynamic min..max graphs
fully configurable sensors panel — pick any hwmon temp/fan/voltage, label / color / reorder + averaged row
battery, volume, brightness (scroll & click), top processes, uptime (+ load averages), keyboard LEDs, weather (report on hover)
maildir unread/total (envelope + count, off-thread; hides where there's no maildir)
styled clock with 4 configurable header icon slots (custom glyph + command + color each)
taskbar (wlr-foreign-toplevel) and system tray (StatusNotifier) with cascading hover menus
live preferences GUI (right-click the bar or --prefs) — General / Theme / Layout (drag to reorder) / Panels (master-detail per-panel config), applies instantly
data-driven themes (colors + font tiers); save palette+fonts, or bundle the panel colors into the theme too
planned: MPRIS now-playing / network-info panels, multiple bars, occlusion-aware pausing

build & run

# needs GTK4, gtk4-layer-shell, and a wlroots compositor (labwc, sway, …)
cargo build --release
./target/release/xerotop

Pinned to gtk4-rs 0.10, so it builds on Rust 1.89 and up (current stable too).

configure

right-click the bar (or --prefs) and use the live GUI — pick a panel, configure it, applies instantly:

xerotop Panels preferences: a master list of panels on the left, the selected panel's options (here the header's clock formats, icon slots and power-menu commands) on the right.

first run also writes ~/.config/xerotop/config.toml — the same settings as plain TOML:

theme = "default"

[bar]
edge = "right"      # left | right | top | bottom
thickness = 150     # px
length = "full"     # "full" or a pixel count
opacity = 0.88

[[panel]]
type = "cpu"
interval = 2
graph = true