Polybar

Introduction
Polybar provides a status bar, similar to i3bar. It is a good alternative for systems without pulseaudio.

Installation
Review the available USE flags:

Emerge as per normal:

Configuration
Polybar has a sample configuration file which is installed at. This file demonstrates the different configuration options for polybar, but cannot be used directly.

A working sample would look as follows:

This declares a new bar called "mybar", and identifies which modules are being used and instructs polybar to create a systray for hosting applets. The optional section [colors] makes it easier to use colors in the different modules.

Next the various declared sections can be added.

Date
The following adds date and time to the bar. Change the interval to a larger number to reduce power consumption.

i3 window manager
In case polybar is used with the i3 window manager the following can be used to configure the i3 module:

Integration with i3 is described later on in this article.

Filesystem
For monitoring the diskspace utilization of various mountpoints:

LAN
The following section shows the network status for wired lan:

Update the interface line as required.

WLAN
The wifi wireless lan section is almost identical as the wired lan section, but has a few more things to show.

CPU
To show processor utilization the following section can be used:

This section uses the ramp option to graphically show the utilization per core, showing low util as green, mid util as orange and high util as red. Note that the colors section cannot be reused here.

Integration with i3
Polybar can replace i3bar. This requires a few steps.

Replacing i3bar with polybar
Comment out the following section that starts i3bar, and add a statement to launch polybar:

Removal
To remove polybar issue the following:

Do not forget to remove the added files under and to restore the i3bar section in.