AirPods

AirPods in the Noctalia bar: battery for each pod and the case, the listening modes, adaptive noise level, Conversation Awareness, One-Bud ANC and ear detection. This is a port of the Omarchy widget thisisgm/omarchy-pods by GM (thisisgm).

Screenshots

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	harveywuk/airpods
Entries	Bar widget: airpods; panel: panel; service: service

Requirements

The panel never talks to Bluetooth itself. It reads the status line published by the librepods daemon and drives it through librepods-ctl, so both must be installed and the daemon must be running.

Install librepods-ctl on PATH (or set the ctl_path setting below).

The daemon must be a fork with the extensions this plugin needs: a published state file, a status verb, and the ca:, onebud: and adaptive: verbs. Upstream librepods has none of these. Build it from the patched fork (derived from thisisgm/omarchy-pods by GM):

git clone https://github.com/harveywuk/librepods
cd librepods
cmake -B build -G Ninja -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF
cmake --build build
cmake --install build --prefix ~/.local
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable librepods.service
systemctl --user restart librepods.service

Build dependencies: cmake, ninja, pkgconf, Qt 6 (qt6-connectivity, qt6-tools, qt6-declarative, plus the Quick/Widgets/DBus/Bluetooth modules), OpenSSL and libpulse.

~/.local is the prefix the unit expects: it runs %h/.local/bin/librepods. Make sure ~/.local/bin is on PATH, or point ctl_path at the installed librepods-ctl.

Pair your AirPods through the usual Bluetooth flow first.

Usage

Add the AirPods widget to a bar from Settings → Bar. The icon stays hidden until AirPods are connected (see hide_when_disconnected).

• Left click opens the panel.
• Right click cycles the listening mode without opening anything.

The panel is also available directly:

noctalia msg panel-toggle harveywuk/airpods:panel

Settings

Setting	Type	Default	Description
ctl_path	file	empty	Path to librepods-ctl. Leave empty to find it on PATH.
hide_when_disconnected	bool	true	Leave the bar entirely rather than sitting there with nothing to say.

IPC

The service exposes events you can trigger from a compositor keybind, a hook, or the terminal. The main one is cycling the listening mode — the same action as right-clicking the bar widget:

noctalia msg plugin harveywuk/airpods:service all cycle-noise

Bind it in Hyprland, for example:

# ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf
bind = SUPER, N, exec, noctalia msg plugin harveywuk/airpods:service all cycle-noise

Event	Effect
cycle-noise	Cycle the listening mode through the modes the connected device actually has.
refresh	Re-read the daemon's status file immediately.

Notes

• The daemon publishes to $XDG_STATE_HOME/librepods/status.json (falling back to ~/.local/state/librepods/status.json) and removes the file when it stops. The service polls that file; an absent file is shown as "librepods is not running".
• Controls are optimistic: the panel reflects a click immediately and snaps back only if the daemon rejects it or does not confirm within a few seconds.
• The panel reads the daemon's capability keys, so it only draws the modes and toggles the connected device actually supports (a plain AirPods 4 gets no listening section, an AirPods Max gets one battery and no One-Bud ANC).

License

The Lua/UI plugin is MIT (see LICENSE). It is based on thisisgm's MIT-licensed Omarchy widget. The librepods daemon it drives is a separate GPL-3.0 work by Kavish Devar and is not distributed with this plugin.