Are you tired of Linux users showing off their beautiful themes and menubars (bar on top) while you're stuck with the boring and plain default macOS menubar because you thought that macOS was "not customizable"? Today we break those chains, and stop that cycle. In this video we go over the installation of sketchybar, install all the required dependencies, we will also configure some sketchybar themes, and give you the tools you need to customize the menubar to your liking.
As the project owner FelixKratz states in the main repo page
“This bar project aims to create a highly flexible, customizable, fast and powerful status bar replacement for people that like playing with shell scripts.”
If you like this project, please star it in github, also in the same page you can sponsor the developer if you like all the hard work put into this
I don’t know the developer, nor we have exchanged messages
Sketchybar demo
In the video, in this part I show what each part of the bar does when going over the sketchybarrc file
We will later see how to install the sketchybarrc file and other themes
Hide macos menubar
To automatically hide the menu bar (bar on top)
In macOS Sonoma you set the following to Always to hide the menu bar System Settings - Control Center - Automatically hide and show the menu bar
You could instead use the following commands if needed
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osascript -e'tell application "System Events" to set autohide menu bar of dock preferences to true'
To disable this setting
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osascript -e'tell application "System Events" to set autohide menu bar of dock preferences to false'
Sketchybar installation
I’ll be following the installation instructions found in the main setup page
We will need brew, if you don’t have brew installed, go and watch this video
Install sketchybar
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brew tap FelixKratz/formulae
brew install sketchybar
At the end of the sketchybar installation you will see the instructions to load the default configuration, so run these commands
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mkdir-p ~/.config/sketchybar/plugins
cp /opt/homebrew/opt/sketchybar/share/sketchybar/examples/sketchybarrc ~/.config/sketchybar/sketchybarrc
cp-r /opt/homebrew/opt/sketchybar/share/sketchybar/examples/plugins/ ~/.config/sketchybar/plugins/
chmod +x ~/.config/sketchybar/plugins/*# Restart sketchybar to apply the changes
brew services restart felixkratz/formulae/sketchybar
# Run sketchybar at startup
brew services start sketchybar
Then reload sketchybar
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sketchybar --reload
Install dependencies
Install the default fonts and the fonts I personally use
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brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts
brew install--cask font-hack-nerd-font
# Fonts that I personally use
brew install--cask font-meslo-lg-nerd-font
I’m using a modified version of the plugin’s creator theme, so we need to install some additional dependencies that the plugin creator lists
# This shows the apple logo and rest of icons on the right
brew install--cask sf-symbols
# jq is used for parsing JSON data to extract specific pieces of information# such as network status, media playback information, GitHub notifications, etc
brew install jq
# This installs the github cli tool
brew install gh
# This is used for switching audio sources and displaying microphone name
brew install switchaudio-osx
# This shows the icons for the apps
curl -L https://github.com/kvndrsslr/sketchybar-app-font/releases/download/v1.0.23/sketchybar-app-font.ttf -o$HOME/Library/Fonts/sketchybar-app-font.ttf
To reload sketchybar after installing addons
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sketchybar --reload
Install themes
There are several themes created by community members that can be found in the setups discussion
Go over the page, see which one you like, and hopefully the creator properly documented everything so you can replicate it
In this guide I’ll install the theme that the plugin creator uses, also a modified version of that theme, which is what I use, and an additional theme
I haven’t fixed this last theme because I don’t use it, but feel free to do so by going over the ‘setups’ page I shared above
In this guide you will have 2 options:
Only download the 'sketchybar' dir from my dotfiles
Preferred method if you already have your dotfiles and just want to grab the sketchybar part
This is also a good method if you don’t want to clone my repo and deal with git commands
When working with themes, make sure that all of the .sh files inside each theme’s directory have executable permissions, otherwise the scripts won’t work properly
Option 1: DOWNLOAD ‘sketchybar’ dir
You only have to follow 1 of the 2 install theme methods
Remember:
This is the preferred method if you already have your dotfiles and just want to grab my sketchybar part
This is also a good method if you don’t want to clone my repo and deal with git commands
First I’ll create the github directory where I’ll download the themes
If you already have your own dotfiles dir, you don’t need to create the dir below, you can use your own dir instead
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mkdir-p ~/github
cd ~/github/
Do the following in Google Chrome, I tried safari and the download does not work
You will need a github account for this, if you don’t have one, set it up
Or instead you can switch the github.com to github.dev on the top to go to the
Right click on the sketchybar directory and download it to the github directory we created above
If you already have your own dotfiles dir, download it there
Since we didn’t clone the entire repo, there will not be a git configuration, so file permissions will not be preserved, and .sh files may not be executable, we con confirm this with the following command
We will not see an x permission on the file, but instead rw-------
I’m also looking for a file called helper which is the one that graphs the CPU utilization, so need to make that exec as well
-type f shows only files, excluding directories
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cd ~/github/sketchybar
find .-name"*.sh"-type f -execls-l{} +
find .-name"helper"-type f -execls-l{} +
So we will make the files executable
The cd is not needed here, but adding it as a precaution, nothing happens if you’re already in that dir
All files will be listed and you will see now they have rwx--x--x
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cd ~/github/sketchybar
find .-name"*.sh"-type f -execchmod +x {} +
find .-name"helper"-type f -execchmod +x {} +
find .-name"*.sh"-type f -execls-l{} +
find .-name"helper"-type f -execls-l{} +
Now to apply the themes we just downloaded
The first one is my modified version of the owners theme
I use yabai in stack mode so I disabled the spaces, as I keep all my apps in a single macOS desktop/workspace
If you want to learn more about my yabai config, watch this video
I also switch between apps using karabiner-elements mappings, for that you can check this video
If you’re not using yabai or not using it in stack mode and using multiple macOS desktops/workspaces, this is probably a better choice, as you will be able to see your desktops and apps on each one. Also switch between spaces
This below is a community theme, I haven’t configured it properly, because I don’t use it but you can figure it out by following the following thread in setups discussion
If you downloaded the sketchybar dir, make sure you add the code below to your zshrc file for the brew item to auto update when you run brew commands
The code that you need to add to your ~/.zshrc file is shown here
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# I'm using vim to edit the file here, but use whichever text editor you want# If the file already exists, its timestamp will be updated, but the existing# content won't be affected by the 'touch' command belowtouch ~/.zshrc
vim ~/.zshrc
Option 2: CLONE dotfiles-latest repo
You only have to follow 1 of the 2 install theme methods
We’ll be switching to a new repo, which has the same contents I had in the repo we have been using, but it has more updates and is the repo that I’ll keep maintaining from now on
If you want to fork the repo to have your own copy and make changes to re upload to your own github account, see my following video 04 - What are dotfiles and how to clone them
The commands below apply to both if you’re new and want to clone my entire repo, or if you’re switching from my old repo
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# If the github dir already exists, no issues, you can still run the commandmkdir-p ~/github
cd ~/github/
git clone https://github.com/linkarzu/dotfiles-latest.git
We’ll checkout to the specific commit shown in the video so that the files look the same as in the video and you don’t
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cd dotfiles-latest
git checkout adf127a73b6c57383b6ae17211ceeaf978f70b4a
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# Create a backup of the existing ~/.zshrc file# If the original ~/.zshrc file does not exist, nothing will happencp ~/.zshrc ~/.zshrc_backup_$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S)>/dev/null 2>&1
# Create the symlink to point .zshrc to the file in my dotfiles-latest repoln-snf ~/github/dotfiles-latest/zshrc/zshrc-file.sh ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc
Then you need to switch the theme by editing the following file ~/github/dotfiles-latest/zshrc/zshrc-file.sh
After editing the file as I show in the video source it, that will also reload sketchybar
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source ~/.zshrc
Uninstall sketchybar
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brew uninstall sketchybar
brew untap FelixKratz/formulae
pkill "sketchybar"
osascript -e'tell application "System Events" to set autohide menu bar of dock preferences to false'
If you’re using my .zshrc config, also make sure to comment the create_symlink line related to sketchybar
You could also delete the rest of the dependencies that were installed (jq, fonts, switchaudio-osx, gh), but I like keeping them, as all of them are dependencies that I use, the rest are just fonts, it doesn’t hurt me to keep them.
If you want to uninstall them just run a brew uninstall command instead of brew install
Community-driven promotion
Do you want to promote yourself in my channel? I’m not talking about a company like notion, brilliant, and all those other ones we’re using to seeing. I’m talking about you as a person, do you have a project, course, youtube channel or product and trying to reach an audience?
If interested, pricing and all the details can be found in this other page
You’re a fraud, why do you ask for money, isn’t YouTube Ads enough?
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