Performance¶

Vibranium is designed around fast interactive usage. The main objective is to minimize unnecessary work in frequently executed components, especially menus, launchers, and background helpers.

Avoiding unnecessary processes¶

Creating external processes has overhead. Every command requires process creation and program loading.
Because Vibranium relies heavily on Bash, many operations use shell built-ins instead of spawning additional utilities.

Example:

# Avoid:
var=$(echo "$value" | tr 'a-z' 'A-Z')

# Prefer:
var="${value^^}"

Common optimizations include:

Bash parameter expansion instead of sed or awk for simple transformations.
Built-in pattern matching instead of additional filtering commands.
Bash arithmetic instead of external calculators.

External tools are still used when they provide functionality that Bash cannot reasonably replace.

Avoiding repeated work¶

Expensive operations are cached or reused whenever possible. Examples:

Configuration data is loaded once per process instead of repeatedly reading files.
Generated data is cached when recalculation is unnecessary.
Internal libraries avoid repeated filesystem operations.

Batching external operations¶

When external commands are required, Vibranium attempts to reduce the number of calls. Examples:

Hyprland state is queried in batches instead of through many individual hyprctl calls.
Theme generation handles multiple files in a single operation.
Long-running operations use background services and signals instead of blocking interactive components.

Integer-based calculations¶

Bash has no native floating-point arithmetic.
For simple calculations, Vibranium uses fixed-point integer values instead of spawning tools such as bc. Example:

# Represent 5% as 500 hundredths
step=$((5 * 100))

# Perform integer calculation
new=$((current + step))

This avoids additional processes while keeping deterministic results.

Practical impact¶

These optimizations affect the parts of Vibranium used most often:

Menus open quickly because generation has minimal overhead.
Theme changes avoid unnecessary regeneration.
Background tasks do not block interactive components.
Status modules remain responsive by avoiding excessive polling.

Trade-offs¶

Performance-focused shell code has costs:

Some implementations are more complex than their naive alternatives.
Modern Bash features are required.
Optimized code requires stricter maintenance.

Vibranium prioritizes predictable and consistent performance over the simplest possible implementation.

Debugging and profiling¶

Most Vibranium tools provide verbose output and logging.

Useful locations:

~/.cache/vibranium/

When optimizing or debugging, measure the actual bottleneck rather than optimizing assumptions.
The goal is simple: common desktop actions should complete without noticeable delay.