arthur-os/default/quickshell/omarchy-shell/plugins

First-party plugins

These plugins ship with Omarchy and are loaded by the shell at startup. They use the same manifest.json contract as third-party plugins; the only difference is that the shell flags them with __isFirstParty: true so they cannot be disabled.

User-installed plugins live alongside these conceptually but on disk under ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/<plugin-id>/ rather than in this directory.

Plugin	id	kinds	activation	entry point
Bar	omarchy.bar	bar	persistent	bar/Bar.qml
Settings	omarchy.settings	panel	on-demand	settings/SettingsPanel.qml
Image picker	omarchy.image-picker	overlay	on-demand	image-picker/ImagePicker.qml
Omarchy menu	omarchy.menu	menu	on-demand	menu/Menu.qml

Bar

The status bar. Mounted at startup, lives forever. Layout lives in the top-level bar: subtree of ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json (with the shell providing shell-defaults.json when the user has no file). Owns the bar IPC target for refresh hooks fired by indicator scripts. See bar/README.md for the widget catalogue and customization schema.

Bar settings

Visual editor for the entire shell config. Summoned by omarchy-shell-ipc shell summon omarchy.settings "{}" (which is what omarchy launch settings ultimately calls). Provides:

• per-section add/move/remove/edit of bar widget entries
• a separate "Other plugins" section for panels, overlays, services, and menus (entries that live in plugins[] rather than the bar layout)
• a Plugin Manager tab listing every discovered plugin with its manifest
• a dynamic settings form driven by each widget's manifest schema, that writes inline back to the corresponding shell.json entry

Image picker

Fullscreen image-grid selector overlay. Used by omarchy-menu-images (wallpaper picker) and omarchy-theme-switcher (theme picker) and any other caller that wants to present a directory of images with previews.

Two ways to drive it:

• Shell-level summon: omarchy-shell-ipc shell summon omarchy.image-picker '<jsonPayload>'. The payload can carry imageDirs, imageRows, selectedImage, selectionFile, doneFile, colorsFile, colorsRaw, showLabels, filterable. Best for in-shell callers that already speak JSON.
• Direct IPC target: omarchy-shell-ipc image-selector open <imageDirs> <imageRowsB64> <selectedImage> <selectionFile> <doneFile> <colorsFile> <colorsRawB64> <showLabels> <filterable>. Positional args; imageRowsB64 and colorsRawB64 are base64-encoded so embedded newlines / tabs survive the bash argv handoff. This is what omarchy-menu-images uses.

The selection round-trip remains file-based: callers create a selection_file and done_file (both mktemp), pass the paths, and poll done_file for existence. The plugin writes the chosen path into selection_file and touches done_file when it's done. cancel IPC clears it without writing a selection.

The plugin has keepLoaded: true so the layer-shell window survives between summons within a single shell session.

Omarchy menu

Quickshell-powered replacement for the legacy Walker-driven omarchy-menu. The menu UI lives in menu/Menu.qml as a first-party menu plugin and is summoned through the shell (omarchy-shell-ipc shell summon omarchy.menu ...), so it shares the long-running omarchy-shell process instead of starting a second Quickshell instance.

The menu definition lives outside the shell host code:

• defaults: default/omarchy/omarchy-menu.jsonc
• user extensions: ~/.config/omarchy/extensions/omarchy-menu.jsonc

The shell parses both JSONC files at startup (with watchChanges: true so edits take effect without a restart), evaluates when: / checked: bash expressions in a single batched subprocess, and executes the selected action: string directly via Quickshell.execDetached. The long-running shell process keeps the parsed menu in memory, so the keybind → IPC → visible path costs ~30ms cold.

Coming soon

• omarchy.theme-switcher — folds theme switching into the shell.