Sketchybar 2.24.0 blurs beyond bar radius & causes flickering

Author: NateyBCreated Jun 10, 2026Updated Jun 17, 2026

I recently upgraded to 2.24.0 and now the blur_radius attribute now extends beyond the border of the bar; this behavior can cause flickering.

You can see an example of the extended blur_radius here. This is with blur_radius = 10: Image

(There does appear to be an upper limit to this effect. Setting blur_radius = 100 produces the same effect as blur_radius = 10.)

You can see here when blur_radius = 2: Image

When the blur radius is set to a large value (e.g. 10), sketchybar can cause screen shadow flickering with other windows. The flickering only occurs with some applications (e.g. it does not occur with ghostty and does occur with Firefox). You can see the flickering on Firefox here:

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/06db4b13-4e39-4af0-a961-0627e62f2fb9

Setting the blur radius to a low value fixes the issue—I think it is whether the blur effect itself actually touches the window bar, but I am not sure. Of course, this has the downside that the blur radius of the background of the bar is lesser as well.