Documentation / Bar Styles

Bar Styles

The bar isn’t one fixed layout with a cosmetic skin toggle — it’s five structurally different layouts, switchable live from Settings, a CLI command, or a keybind, with no shell restart. The Full style also has three skins, one of which, Signal line, restyles the whole shell. This page covers all of it. For the one-line summary, see Supported Features.

A fresh install starts on Capsule, docked top and horizontal.

The five styles

Style	What it is	Position support
Full	The original bar — workspaces, active window, tray, status icons, clock. Three skins: Pill (filled, rounded), Square (filled, sharp corners) and Signal line (a flat strip with an accent baseline that restyles every shell surface, see Signal line).	Left/right/top/bottom, horizontal or vertical
Dock	A floating macOS-style app dock — pinned + running apps, hover-proximity magnification, its own auto-hide	Horizontal-first; side placement allowed but flagged, see below
Taskbar	A Windows-style grouped task list with a start button that opens the existing launcher	Horizontal-first; same flag
Minimal	A thin, single-accent-color strip — icon-only except the clock (Omarchy-inspired)	Horizontal-first; same flag
Capsule	A single self-sizing floating pill of modular pieces — workspaces, clock, agent status, status icons, an optional media chip — instead of a strip spanning the edge. The default on a fresh install.	Its own floating window; reflows to a stacked layout on a side, see below

All five are switchable live: picking a different one swaps the running bar’s content immediately, no reload.

Switching styles

Settings → Bar — five live, real (not screenshot) previews scaled down, click to switch.
CLI: aphotic bar style <full|dock|taskbar|minimal|capsule>, aphotic bar cycle. See CLI Reference.
Keybind: Super+Ctrl+Shift+B cycles full → dock → taskbar → minimal → capsule → full → .... See Keybindings.

All three paths go through the same single entry point (setBarStyle/cycleBarStyle), so first-selection position defaults and your last-used Full skin are tracked in exactly one place regardless of which trigger you used.

The Full skin is picked in Settings → Bar → Full style background (Pill, Square or Signal line); that row only shows while Full is the active style. There’s no aphotic bar subcommand for skins; from a script, use the shell’s IPC: qs -c aphotic ipc call bar setSkin <pill|square|signal>.

First-selection position defaults

Selecting full restores whichever of pill/square/signal was last active — it never resets to a hardcoded default. Selecting dock, taskbar, or minimal for the first time ever also applies a one-time position default: dock and taskbar go horizontal + bottom-anchored, minimal goes horizontal + top-anchored. Capsule already counts as selected on a fresh install (it starts horizontal + top). Re-selecting the same style later never re-applies this — only a style’s first-ever selection counts, so a later manual position change you make sticks for good.

Full

The original bar: workspaces, active window pill, tray, status icons, clock, dockable to any screen edge. Which widgets show, and in what order, is editable in Settings → Bar (the widget list only applies to Full). pill, square and signal are skins within Full, not separate styles — switching to Full always restores whichever one you had last.

Full (and Taskbar) keep real hover popouts on every status icon, the tray, and the active window pill — volume, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, VPN, battery/power profile, agent sessions, host info, Pomodoro, window title, keyboard layout, lock state, live resource meter. Dock and Minimal don’t have this yet — see Known limitations below.

Signal line

Added in 2.0.7, and the look the README and gallery screenshots use. Pick it in Settings → Bar → Full style background → Signal line.

On the bar itself, Signal line swaps the filled strip for a flat, square-edged, translucent one with a 1 px accent-colour baseline along its inner edge. Where the notch hangs from the bar, the baseline opens in two halves and flows into the notch outline. The clock loses its pill background and icon and shows the time larger and bolder.

It is also a shell-wide style, not only a bar skin. While it is active, every shell surface switches to the same treatment: layered “dark glass” panels lifted slightly off the base colour, hairline borders, uppercase letter-spaced section labels, and reworked layouts in the launcher (a sheet growing out of the bottom screen edge), the Command Center (its tabs sit on their own glass capsule), Settings, the popouts, notifications, OSD, lock screen, session menu, switcher, wallpaper picker and more. Theme cards in Settings → Appearance preview each theme’s own wallpaper.

Signal line is tied to the Full style: switching to Dock, Taskbar, Minimal or Capsule returns every surface to the regular look, and switching back to Full restores Signal line if it was your last Full skin.

The shared open/close motion that also landed in 2.0.7 (surfaces slide in from their edge while fading and scaling up slightly, with list rows cascading in) is not tied to the skin; every style uses it.

Dock

Unlike Full, Taskbar and Minimal, Dock isn’t rendered inside the bar’s normal layout slot at all — it’s its own always-present floating overlay window, shown only when Dock is the active style, sized to the dock pill itself rather than spanning a screen edge. This is the same overlay-window pattern the rest of the shell already uses for Notifications/OSD/Command Center, just not the “reserve a strip along one edge” model Full/Taskbar/Minimal use — Dock’s compact, floating geometry doesn’t fit that model.

Auto-hide (Auto-hide when a window is focused in Settings → Bar → Dock) — a content-transform effect only: opacity plus a slide-off in the direction the dock is anchored, never a re-anchor. It shows again on hover, or whenever nothing is focused (a rough but cheap proxy for “nothing to get out of the way of,” since Hyprland’s IPC doesn’t cheaply expose real per-window occlusion).
Magnification (Icon magnification on hover, on by default) — a smooth, quadratic-falloff hover-scale from the pointer’s position (not linear — it reads as a proper macOS-style “wave” rather than a hard-edged jump), up to 1.6x. Horizontal placement only; there’s no meaningful “distance along the dock” to magnify against in a side placement.
Pinned apps — desktop-entry ids you choose in Settings, merged with whatever’s actually running: pinned apps show up whether or not they’re open, and running apps show up whether or not they’re pinned. Nothing needs to be pinned first just to appear.

Taskbar

A Windows-style horizontal strip: a start button, then either one entry per running app (grouped, the default) or one entry per window (ungrouped — Group windows by app in Settings → Bar → Taskbar), then the existing tray/status icons/clock. The start button opens the same launcher every other trigger does — it isn’t a second app menu.

Taskbar keeps the same hover-popout behavior Full has on its tray and status icons (Dock and Minimal don’t).

Capsule

The newest style, and structurally the most different of the five: Capsule isn’t a strip at all, it’s a single floating pill window that never resizes with its own content — the pill’s length is a pure function of what’s docked inside it plus a configured minimum, so nothing shifts sideways under the pointer when something expands. Left to right (or top to bottom, stacked, in a side placement): workspace dots, a divider, the clock, the agent status indicator, the status-icon cluster, and — when something is playing — a media chip.

Media chip (Show media in the capsule in Settings) — appears only while a player is active. Click to pin the expanded view open, or hover to reveal it temporarily (Expand on hover); it springs out from the pill’s trailing edge rather than opening a separate popout window.
Animated album artwork shape — the media surface’s artwork morphs shape as it expands, purely cosmetic, toggle it off if you’d rather it stay a plain square.
Animate transitions — the spring-based open/close and auto-hide slide; turning it off makes every state change instant instead of animated.
Auto-hide — same autohide bar-visibility setting the other styles use: the pill slides most of the way off-screen and peeks back on hover or on a workspace switch.

Like Dock, Capsule lives in its own floating overlay window rather than the edge-docked strip Full/Taskbar/Minimal share, so it works in any position without the side-placement caveats those three carry.

Minimal

A solid-accent-color strip, icon-only except the clock text. Left to right: workspace dots, a small toggle-indicator cluster, the agent status icon, tray, clock.

Minimal’s indicator cluster is deliberately scoped to toggle-type indicators only — things you flip on/off, currently just Do Not Disturb (Show Do Not Disturb indicator in Settings → Bar → Minimal gates whether it shows). Continuous status readouts like Wi-Fi signal strength or battery percentage stay in Full/Taskbar’s status-icon cluster and simply aren’t shown here — that’s the tradeoff of the icon-only strip, not a bug. An inactive indicator stays present but invisible (still hoverable at low opacity to reveal itself), so more toggle-style indicators can be added later without a layout change.

Settings → Bar pane

Each of the five preview cards in Settings → Bar is a real, live, scaled-down instance of that style’s actual bar component — not a screenshot or a mockup — so what you see in the picker is exactly what you’ll get, live-themed like everything else. Clicking a card switches styles; the miniature bar underneath isn’t itself interactive.

The position-mismatch warning

None of Dock, Taskbar, or Minimal have a real vertical/side-placement layout — all three are horizontal-first designs (see Known limitations). Settings shows a warning banner (“This style is designed for top/bottom placement – side placement may look broken.”) whenever any style other than Full is combined with a side (non-horizontal) placement; Capsule gets the banner too, even though its pill reflows to a stacked layout on a side. This is a flag, not a block: the combination is allowed and won’t crash, it’s just likely to look broken, particularly for Taskbar and Minimal, whose layouts assume a full-width horizontal strip. Dock is the most tolerant of the three in a side placement — it just loses magnification there.

Migration note: the repurposed `minimal` value

If you have an existing install from before 1.1.0 with the bar’s background set to minimal: that value used to mean “Full-style bar, transparent fill, border-only outline” — a purely cosmetic background treatment on the one fixed layout, with the same workspaces/tray/status-icon/clock content as pill/square. It was intentionally repurposed to mean the new, structurally different Minimal style instead (icon-only strip, no workspace/status-icon cluster, solid accent background) — a one-time, deliberate change, not a bug. If your bar changed shape after updating, this is almost certainly why. There’s no setting that reproduces the old transparent/outline look anymore; switch to Full with the pill or square skin from Settings → Bar (or aphotic bar style full, which restores whichever Full skin you had last) if you want the old Full-bar look back.

Known limitations

No real side placement for Dock/Taskbar/Minimal. All three are horizontal-first designs; a side placement is allowed (with the warning above) but not a first-class layout for any of them. Capsule doesn’t carry this limitation — its floating pill reflows to a stacked layout in a side placement instead of assuming a horizontal strip.
No hover-popout system on Dock, Minimal, or Capsule. Full and Taskbar both have the detailed hover panels described above; picking any of the other three currently means losing that layer of detail entirely, not just a cosmetic gap. Capsule’s media chip is its own separate mechanism, not a stand-in for the status-icon popouts.