keybars

PRESS

keybars for press

In a sentence

keybars turns your keyboard’s backlight into a music equaliser, and keybars Pro lights it with what else is happening: your builds, your coding agents, a timer or a calm scene.

In a paragraph

keybars is a free, open source command-line tool that draws music as bars across a per-key RGB keyboard. keybars Pro is a desktop app for Linux, macOS and Windows that does the same with no setup, and adds modes: Notify lights keys from scripts, GitHub and webhooks; one key shows whether a coding agent such as Claude Code or Codex is working, waiting or done; Focus runs a pomodoro along the top row; Ambient plays rain, embers or an aurora when the music stops. A marketplace shares looks, rule packs, scenes and key maps, each previewed on the keyboard you pick.

Facts

  • Made by Jonathan Warykowski, alone: design, the apps, the site and the marketplace.
  • keybars is free and MIT licensed, on GitHub, installed with Homebrew.
  • keybars Pro is US$24 once (€24, £20 or A$39, tax included), with a year of updates; after that, everything it had keeps working.
  • Systems: Linux, macOS 14.2 or later, and Windows 10 or 11.
  • Keyboards: ZSA Moonlander, Voyager and Planck EZ over USB; per-key RGB keyboards through OpenRGB, with maps for popular QMK boards. Every board, drawn.
  • Built with Go, Wails and Svelte for the app; Hugo, Cloudflare Workers and D1 for the site and marketplace.
  • Privacy: nothing the app hears is recorded or sent; the site keeps no analytics.

Who makes it

Jonathan Warykowski is a software engineer in Australia, and a long-time ZSA fan. It started with an ErgoDox EZ, in black and then again in white, and carried on to the Moonlander and the Voyager. Keyboards that good deserved more than a static backlight, so keybars began as a weekend script that drew music as bars across the keys. It grew into keybars Pro: a desktop app that lights the keyboard with music, builds, coding agents and calm scenes. Jonathan designed and built all of it: the app in Go and Svelte, the command line, and the site and marketplace on Cloudflare Workers.

The logo as SVG: four green bars on a dark key. Keep it on a dark ground, and write the name in lower case, keybars.

Images

The share image (1200 by 630). Clips of each mode on a real keyboard are on their way; ask for anything you need meanwhile.

Contact

Jonathan Warykowski, at support@jwarykowski.dev. More of my work is at jwarykowski.dev and code.warykowski.io.