Alternatives to Quickshell
A QtQuick toolkit for building your own status bars, widgets, lockscreens and desktop shells. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Quickshell
A QtQuick toolkit for building your own status bars, widgets, lockscreens and desktop shells.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Quickshell.
AGS
Scaffolding CLI for building custom Linux desktop shells and widgets.
AGS is a scaffolding CLI for building custom Linux desktop shells and widgets, popular in the Wayland ricing community, using scripting instead of QML.
Eww
Create custom desktop widgets using declarative configuration and styling.
Eww builds panels and desktop widgets from declarative configuration and styling, displaying information from scripts you maintain, under the MIT license.
Zebar
A tool for building custom taskbars, desktop widgets and popups on Windows, macOS and Linux.
Zebar builds custom taskbars, widgets and popups and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, made by the GlazeWM team.
Ironbar
A customisable GTK4 status bar for Wayland compositors, written in Rust.
Ironbar is a ready-made GTK4 Wayland status bar written in Rust, configured through files rather than a toolkit for whole shells or lockscreens.
Waybar
Add a customizable status bar to compatible Wayland desktops.
Waybar is a customizable Wayland status bar with workspace and system modules, offering a finished bar rather than building lockscreens or full shells.
Also worth comparing
These listings name Quickshell as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
Lemonbar
Featherweight, scriptable status bar for X11 built on xcb.
Quickshell is a QtQuick toolkit for building bars, widgets and whole shells in QML, offering flexible layouts and animation at the cost of more setup.
nwg-panel
Add desktop panels to Sway and Hyprland using GTK.
Quickshell is a QtQuick toolkit for building bars, widgets, lockscreens and whole shells in QML, rather than a ready-made GTK panel.
Polybar
Build a configurable status bar for an X11 desktop.
Quickshell is a QtQuick toolkit for building bars, widgets and whole shells, so you write QML or adopt a community config instead of Polybar modules.
xmobar
A minimalist text-based status bar for X11, written in Haskell and often paired with xmonad.
Quickshell is a QtQuick toolkit for building bars, widgets and whole shells, requiring QML rather than Haskell and offering flexible layouts and animation.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Hyprland
Arrange Linux application windows with a configurable tiling Wayland compositor.
Sway
Use an i3-style tiling workflow on Wayland.
niri
A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that places windows in columns on an endless horizontal strip.
rofi
A keyboard-driven window switcher, application launcher and dmenu replacement for Linux desktops.
Übersicht
Put script-driven widgets on the macOS desktop.
