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