RFC: sketchy-helper — a native macOS event daemon for SketchyBar

[malpern]

Building sketchybar-toggle made something clear: SketchyBar's helper/plugin ecosystem is built on C, Rust, and Lua with cross-platform abstractions, so nobody is bridging Apple's native frameworks to push real-time events into SketchyBar. Instead, people poll shell commands, hit permission walls on new macOS versions, or give up entirely.

The idea

A single Swift daemon — sketchy-helper — that subscribes to native macOS callbacks and fires SketchyBar --trigger events with environment variables carrying the payload. Event-driven, not polling.

Proposed signals

Each of these maps to a real pain point in this community:

Signal	macOS Framework	Pain point
Now Playing (track, artist, app)	MediaRemote	media_change broken on Sequoia (#708)
Audio device & volume changes	CoreAudio	SwitchAudioSource polling hangs (Discussion #782)
WiFi / network status	CoreWLAN, NWPathMonitor	Permission breakage across updates (#616, #517)
App notification badges	Accessibility / UserNotifications	Not possible via scripts (Discussion #317)
Window title without yabai	Accessibility	Unwanted dependency on yabai (#435)
Focus / DND mode	NSDoNotDisturbCenter	No existing solution
Keyboard input source	TISInputSource	Breaking on Tahoe (Discussion #767)

How it would work

# Start the daemon
sketchy-helper --start

# In your sketchybarrc, subscribe to its events
sketchybar --add event media_changed
sketchybar --add item media left \\
           --subscribe media media_changed \\
           --set media script=\"echo $TRACK - $ARTIST\"

• Pure Swift, uses Apple frameworks directly — no shelling out
• Event-driven callbacks, not polling
• Ships as a single binary via Homebrew
• Later: Mach message support for direct helper communication

What do you think?

Which of these signals would you actually use? What's missing? React or comment — trying to figure out what to build first.

[GNRSN]

An event I have been missing is reacting to monitors attached/detached in order to update my Aerospace/window manager integration without constantly polling and redrawing it, I have no macos dev dev experience but from a quick search this seems to be possible to achieve with coregraphics.cgdisplayregisterreconfigurationcallback

[nbonfire]

i want to show/hide items based on focus mode, (don't need to show ppl my cal and to-dos when im presenting) im using a bash script to scrape the DND database but its janky due to needing full disk access. this would definitely be useful.

Edit: ive since updated to tahoe, and i have a new workaround - a sketchybar event that I trigger from a shortcut "Get Current Focus" that runs a shell script to trigger the sketchybar event including a "MODE=focus Name" variable. Tahoe has shortcut "automations" and one of the choices are for when focus modes are turned on or off. So just set an automation for each of the focus modes, have it fire when that focus mode is turned on or off and handle the event in your focus item's script. The automations are kind of limited though, so you need a separate automation for each focus mode (but you can reuse the same shortcut.) There's an automation option for wifi changes also.