thallia
Ricing with Polybar (& i3)
Welcome back to another tidBit!
A while ago I set up my laptop with polybar, but I decided I needed an upgrade.
I found a beautiful polybar setup on reddit, so I copied it and sat down to get it working on my laptop.
The first issue was getting the icons to work. I kept getting errors like this:
warn: Dropping unmatched character  (U+e028)
To fix this, I needed to find what icon pack the original author was using. Down in the polybar config, there was a line that said:
font-0 = Inconsolata:size=10;1
font-1 = lineawesome:size=13;1
Lineawesome is a similar icon package to fontawesome, so I knew that was the font package I needed to get. Finding this page on lineawesome’s website I was able to download the ZIP file. Once extracted, the .ttf file inside is what I needed.
Once you’ve located the .ttf file, you need to move it to the font directory on your laptop.
mv ~/Downloads/line-awesome/line-awesome.ttf ~/.local/share/fonts/
Once that’s done, you have to reset the font cache with:
fc-cache -f -v
Running polybar <name of bar> after that displayed the icons! Woo!
After that, it was smooth sailing for customization. Every button now launches the program I want:
- Search: Launches
gnome-terminal -e ranger(a file explorer) - Camera: Launches
flameshot gui -p ~/directory/to/save/screenshot(flameshot is a great screenshot service) - Compass: Launches
firefox(browser) - File folder: Launches
nautilus - Pen & Paper: Launches
atom - Music: Launches
rhythmbox
You can find my polybar config here: https://gitlab.com/thallia/dotconfig/blob/master/polybar/config