Get yabai to respect ubersicht status bar height

[nwaywood]

Sorry if this is a noob question, but windows managed by yabai (in BSP mode) are covering up my status bar.

To illustrate the problem, I have reduced my ubersicht bar to just be a single example file, bar.jsx:

export const refreshFrequency = false

export const className = ` 
  z-index: -1;
  position: fixed;
  height: 30px;
  top: 0;
  left: 0;
  right: 0;
  width: 100%;
  opacity: 0.9;
  background-color: #FF69B4;
`

export const render = () => (
    <div></div>
)

On an empty screen, you can see the whole bar (obviously):

But with windows open, they cover the status bar:

How do I make yabai respect the height of the status bar and not cover it up?

[nwaywood]

FYI to anyone that comes across this, as a hack in the meantime I have just increased the top_padding to factor in the height of the status bar

[nwaywood]

Btw, the reason why this hack I am currently doing is insufficient is because it means to can't use the toggle padding command:

yabai -m space --toggle padding

[koekeishiya]

There is no facility to do this in a way that is supported by --toggle padding yet. I can't think of a better solution than the one I used in chunkwm, which was basically having the following config options:

chunkc set custom_bar_enabled            0
chunkc set custom_bar_all_monitors       0
chunkc set custom_bar_offset_top         22
chunkc set custom_bar_offset_bottom      0
chunkc set custom_bar_offset_left        0
chunkc set custom_bar_offset_right       0

Do you know of other window managers that handle this type of functionality?

Edit:

This solution has a set of issues, as it is based on the assumption that there is only one bar running, and/or that it has the same dimensions on all displays. It is also either on one display or ALL displays etc, so there are a lot of theoretical cases that this type of config will not handle. This is also why I have not implemented this in yabai, because I don't think it is a good solution.

[nwaywood]

Surely the main use case for the majority of users will be the bar having the same dimensions on all displays, no?

If that is the case, even if custom_bar_offset_top isn't a perfect solution I think it would be satisfactory for most, including me.

[koekeishiya]

Implemented the following on master:

yabai -m config external_bar [<main|all|off>:<top_padding>:<bottom_padding>]

Specify top and bottom padding for a potential custom bar that you may be running.
main: Apply the given padding only to spaces located on the main display.
all: Apply the given padding to all spaces regardless of their display.
off: Do not apply any special padding.

[ben-toker]

Hey I encountered this and came up with my own solution that I think could help people. In my yabairc, I just execute the following shell script, which adjusts yabai's top padding depending on aspect ratio (weird scaling differences between 16:9 and native monitor, 16:10 so that's the only ones I have here but its easily modifiable).

Shell script (requires jq installation)

Step 1: install jq

brew install jq

Step 2: save the following shell script, call it whatever

#!/bin/bash

# Query the resolution of the active display
width=$(yabai -m query --displays --display | jq '.frame.w' | cut -d'.' -f1)
height=$(yabai -m query --displays --display | jq '.frame.h' | cut -d'.' -f1)

# Calculate the GCD of width and height to reduce the aspect ratio
gcd() {
    local a=$1
    local b=$2
    while [ "$b" -ne 0 ]; do
        local temp=$b
        b=$((a % b))
        a=$temp
    done
    echo $a
}

gcd_value=$(gcd $width $height)
aspect_width=$((width / gcd_value))
aspect_height=$((height / gcd_value))

# Set padding based on the calculated aspect ratio
if [[ "$aspect_width:$aspect_height" == "16:9" ]]; then
    yabai -m config top_padding 35  # 16:9 monitor
elif [[ "$aspect_width:$aspect_height" == "16:10" ]]; then
    yabai -m config top_padding 5   # 16:10 monitor
else
    yabai -m config top_padding 30  # Default for other aspect ratios
fi

Step 3: Put the path to the script in your .yabairc

An example of what my path looks like:
~/.config/scripts/displayresize.sh

There's probably a better, easier way to do this, but this is the best dynamic solution I could personally come up with. Hope this helps whoever finds this.