Privacy spacer

The privacy spacer is an invisible, fixed-width native widget placed at the far right by default. It permanently reserves room for macOS privacy indicators so camera, microphone, screen-recording, and system-audio indicators do not overlap the final visible widget.

[builtins.privacy_spacer]
enabled = true
position = "right"
order = 1000
width = 12

The predefined spacer supports enabled, position, order, group, and width. It has no icon, text, hover state, popup, or action surface. While enabled, it always reserves its configured width. Automatic resizing is intentionally not supported because public macOS APIs do not provide one reliable system-wide activity feed covering every privacy indicator and their exact display timing.

Set enabled = false to remove the reserved area. Increase width when the system indicator still crowds the final widget. The accepted range is 1 through 100 points.

Capture events for Lua

The fixed spacer does not subscribe to capture events. Camera and microphone events remain available to Lua widgets through the demand-driven capture source:

• easybar.events.capture_devices_changed
• easybar.events.capture_activity_changed
• easybar.events.camera_activity_changed
• easybar.events.microphone_activity_changed

The source starts only while a Lua widget subscribes to one of these events. When a subscription is first added, EasyBar emits its current snapshot for that event. Every subsequent event includes event.capture with aggregate activity flags plus the connected camera and microphone arrays.

widget:subscribe(easybar.events.capture_activity_changed, function(event)
    local capture = event.capture
    if capture and capture.active then
        widget:set({ label = "Recording" })
    else
        widget:set({ label = "" })
    end
end)

These events represent camera and microphone device activity. They do not claim to detect unrelated applications performing screen-only recording. See Events for the complete payload fields.

Additional named spacers

Declare any number of additional spacers below builtins.spacers. The section name is the spacer's identifier and must be unique:

[builtins.spacers.before_clock]
enabled = true
position = "right"
order = 55
width = 8

[builtins.spacers.after_inbox]
enabled = true
position = "right"
order = 10
width = 12

Named spacers are config-only and do not appear individually in Native Widgets. Each named spacer supports enabled, position, order, group, and width, and always reserves its configured width while enabled.

Suggested widths

The default privacy width is 12 points. Smaller values such as 6–12 points also work well for visual separation between widgets.