Native support for multiple displays

[curusarn]

I just discovered polybar and it looks amazing.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

However, when I tried it out the status bar only showed up on one monitor. According to the issues I have to launch one polybar instance per monitor and I have to take extra care to relaunch polybar instances after my monitor setup changes.

Why does polybar need this feature?

If I understand this correctly everyone who uses multiple monitors at any point needs to go through a process of putting together scripts to handle launching and relaunching of polybar.
This seems rather painful and opens up space for mistakes.

This is a standard feature - other simple status bars have it (i3blocks, i3status, ...) It seems to me that seamless multi-monitor handling would be better default behavior for most users.

Describe the solution you'd like

I would like to have an (configuration) option that would launch the polybar in multimonitor mode. Polybar would then render on all monitors and it would handle monitor adding and removing automatically.

The default behavior would stay the same to enable different polybar setups for different monitors.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I looked through the issues and I know that it's pretty easy to launch polybar on all monitors. The problem I have with this solution is that then I would need to put together scripts to handle adding and removing monitors.

Ref: #763 Ref: #555

[laferuben]

I would also like to add that there should be two options: to render polybar only at a primary monitor (I tried to search through the code and I see there's some support for it but it does not work) and to render default polybar bar at all monitors with tray being only on primary.

[Lomadriel]

I would also like to add that there should be two options: to render polybar only at a primary monitor (I tried to search through the code and I see there's some support for it but it does not work) and to render default polybar bar at all monitors with tray being only on primary.

At the moment, there is nothing to do that, the only solution is to use a script. But I agree, this might be a nice feature to have, this might be implemented one day but this is not a priority now. Currently, we try to refactor the code and to reduce the number of bugs in polybar.

[patrick96]

Funny you should ask about that, this was actually one of the first things I asked about when I first started using polybar (see #32) :smile: But it never wound up being implemented, we should track it here.

This has been asked in various places before and it should ultimately be the goal to have polybar spawn multiple bars with the same content. But @Lomadriel is right, currently we are mainly focused on making polybar have less bugs and being easier to maintain, new features have quite a low priority, especially if they require substantial changes like this one.

to render polybar only at a primary monitor

@laferuben this is actually an unreleased feature (see #1426). So if you have compiled against the latest commit, you can leave the monitor name empty and it will select the primary monitor (if there is one).

[curusarn]

Thanks for your replies. I understand that the project has different priorities at the moment. I will be happy to try the project when it gets more mature.

[laferuben]

Oh, it's not in the release tag. Thanks, will try it now.