Front application

Output #

The name of the application owning the menu bar, with an optional native colour icon.

The provider follows menu-bar ownership, not keyboard focus. A temporary launcher leaves the underlying application’s name and icon in place while that application still owns the menu bar.

Configuration #

Use the item-level text template to customise or hide the label.

Change frontApplication.showIcon in the configuration file and let it reload. The frontApplication block cannot be changed with sbar set.

Appearance #

The native icon replaces the item’s symbol. If macOS provides no icon, the item uses its configured symbol as a fallback. The icon retains its original colours. Its size follows style.fontSize, then the theme font size. There is no separate icon-size option. Item tint and symbolFontWeight do not recolour or change the weight of the native image; they still apply to an SF Symbol fallback.

Set the item’s symbolPosition to right to put the icon after the application name. It defaults to left and also controls the fallback symbol. See symbol placement.

Icon-only item #

{
  "id": "app",
  "type": "frontApplication",
  "symbol": "app",
  "frontApplication": {
    "showIcon": true
  },
  "text": ""
}

The empty text hides the application name. The configured SF Symbol provides a fallback when the native icon is unavailable.

Shared item options cover styling, symbols, actions, priority, and enabled state.

Text templates #

The item-level text setting supports id, value, symbol, name. See text templates for shared fields and syntax. name and value both contain the menu-bar owner’s name, even when text supplies a fixed label. Both are empty when macOS supplies no name.

Templates without {{symbol}} retain the normal icon behaviour. If a template contains that tag, the native icon or fallback symbol appears only when a branch containing the tag renders. Native icons still require frontApplication.showIcon: true.

To show the native icon only for Safari, enable frontApplication.showIcon and put {{symbol}} inside a name condition:

{
  "id": "application",
  "type": "frontApplication",
  "text": "{{#name=Safari}}{{symbol}}{{/name}}{{name}}",
  "frontApplication": { "showIcon": true }
}

The application name always appears, but its native icon appears only for Safari. The configured item symbol remains the fallback if the native icon is unavailable.

Updates #

The provider reads the menu-bar owner at startup, then observes changes to that ownership. The icon and name follow the refresh policy together, including interval and manual snapshots. See refresh policies for snapshot and trigger behaviour.

Current limits #

There is no window-title option.

Example #

{
  "id": "frontApplication",
  "type": "frontApplication",
  "frontApplication": { "showIcon": true }
}