Touch Bar mini app: Now Playing (spectrum, track, transport buttons)

[DataKnox]

What

A first Touch Bar mini app for Touch Bar MacBook Pros: a live audio spectrum, the current track with album art, and previous / play-pause / next buttons drawn straight onto the Touch Bar. Super + Ctrl + M toggles it; tapping F1–F12 at the right end of the bar hands the function keys back.

Track info comes from the shell's media service (omarchy-shell media status), so it works for the Spotify web app this fork uses, and equally for cliamp, mpv, or a browser tab. The spectrum comes from cava listening to PipeWire. Colours follow the active theme.

How it fits

tiny-dfr owns the Touch Bar's DRM device and digitizer, both root-only. The app borrows them through omarchy-touchbar-handoff, a small root helper:

• app stops tiny-dfr, grants the calling user an ACL on the bar's DRM node and digitizer, and makes the user the owner of the bar's backlight attribute (sysfs has no ACLs).
• keys reverses that and starts tiny-dfr again.
• devices prints what would be handed over, without root (used by the test).

etc/sudoers.d/omarchy-touchbar lets wheel run exactly the app and keys invocations without a password, the same pattern as omarchy-dns and omarchy-theme-set-browser-policy: a hotkey has no terminal to carry a password prompt. The app runs keys on every exit path, including a failed handoff.

Included

• bin/omarchy-touchbar-now-playing: the app, one Python file. Raw DRM modesetting with a dumb buffer, cairo drawing rotated onto the portrait panel, evdev multitouch for taps. Dependencies beyond the base install: cava, python-cairo, python-gobject.
• bin/omarchy-touchbar-handoff and etc/sudoers.d/omarchy-touchbar: the handoff described above.
• bin/omarchy-hw-touchbar: detection by the digitizer's input device name (M1, M2 and T2 names).
• bin/omarchy-toggle-touchbar-now-playing and bin/omarchy-install-touchbar-now-playing: the hotkey target; installs cava in a floating terminal on first use.
• default/hypr/bindings/media.lua: Super + Ctrl + M, bound only when omarchy-hw-touchbar succeeds.
• default/omarchy/omarchy-menu.jsonc: Trigger > Hardware > Touch Bar: Now Playing, guarded with when.
• docs/touchbar.md and a README link.
• tests/test-touchbar-hw.sh: detection and device discovery against fake sysfs trees for both Apple Silicon and T2 device names.

Tested

• Daily use on a MacBook Pro 13" M2 (2022) on linux-asahi 7.1.6 and this fork at v4.0.2: handoff both ways, spectrum, album art, all three buttons, idle dimming, and clean return to tiny-dfr, including when the helper itself fails.
• bin/omarchy commands --check passes (461 commands), tests/test-touchbar-hw.sh passes 8/8, ./test/all passes except config-test.sh and unowned-system-paths-test.sh, which need an omarchy-pkgs checkout and fail identically on an untouched quattro.
• Not tested on a T2 Mac. The device discovery covers appletbdrm and the T2 digitizer name, and the test exercises those paths, but a T2 owner should confirm before it is claimed as supported there.

Notes for review

• Two questions for you: whether you would rather ship this in the tree or link to it, and whether cava should be installed by an install/hardware/apple script on Touch Bar Macs instead of on first use.
• The app also lives standalone with an install.sh at https://github.com/DataKnox/omarchy-touchbar for anyone who wants it before this lands.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01Tz9ekXeW8ijPdrDtHt4Rym

[malik-na]

The app handoff stops tiny-dfr before setfacl and chown, but the helper has no rollback if either step fails. Add a trap that restores any partial ACL or ownership change and restarts tiny-dfr, then cover the partial-failure paths.