Right now the Polybar community lives mainly on IRC and Reddit (and GitHub of course). Reddit is great for asking longer forum-style questions and IRC is great for a quick back-and-forth. IRC has a major downside in that messages are only delivered to people that are online at that time and messages are not logged. This makes it tedious to communicate at times and most people don’t have an IRC bouncer running 24/7. A lot of questions on IRC never get answered because people have to log off before anyone comes around to answering some hours later.

Say Hello to Gitter

Gitter is a free and open-source chat platform built by GitLab. It has some nice features like markdown and LaTeX math formatting and the ability to create multiple separate rooms in the same community.

It has a nice web interface and apps on various platforms and it’s easier to use than IRC.

The Polybar community Gitter room is at gitter.im/polybar/polybar. We hope that most people that are on IRC will also join us there and that it attracts people who don’t use IRC.

Both our subreddit and the IRC channel will stay around. Reddit is still great for more involved questions and discussions and you should still use it for that. But for quick questions you are better served on Gitter.

Our hope is that Gitter will be more accessible than our IRC channel and people will have a better experience getting their questions answered. Join our Gitter room today!