Ryan Hughes
a960d2b1bf
omarchy-menu used to spawn an 821-line bash bin on every keybind: 11 jq
invocations against omarchy-menu.jsonc, mktemp dance, summon, poll. The
shell waited ~235ms (keybind to visible) before painting the first row.
The bar plugin host is already a persistent process with the menu plugin
loaded (keepLoaded: true) — it just wasn't allowed to own the menu data.
Now it does:
- parseMenuJsonc / normalizeItem ports the bash bin's jq pipeline to
JS: strip // comments + trailing commas, infer parent from dotted
ids, dedupe keyword tokens across id/aliases/keywords, fill defaults.
- Two FileViews with watchChanges: true on the default and user
extension JSONCs. Edit either file and the in-memory item map
refreshes without a restart.
- IpcHandler exposes menu.summon(initialMenu) / refresh() / close() /
ping(). summon resolves aliases the way the old bash route_target
did, including the leaf-alias-is-an-action shortcut.
- Action dispatch is now direct: when summoned via IPC (no selection
or done file), Quickshell.execDetached(['bash','-lc', action]) runs
the action and the menu closes. The legacy tempfile dance is kept
only for the duration of the migration window.
- provider sub-menus (fonts, power-profiles) are inline: tab-delimited
bash one-liner per provider, parsed by mergeProviderRows.
- when:/checked: bash expressions are batched into one Process at
shell startup (and again whenever the JSONCs change). The menu
opens instantly; visibility/check marks settle within ~50ms.
Measured: keybind-to-visible via the new IPC path is ~30ms (was ~235ms).
The bash bin still works for now and is removed in the next commit.
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 carryimageDirs,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;imageRowsB64andcolorsRawB64are base64-encoded so embedded newlines / tabs survive the bash argv handoff. This is whatomarchy-menu-imagesuses.
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
bin/omarchy-menu still owns the Bash action helpers and dynamic providers;
it builds the menu JSON, summons omarchy.menu, waits for the selection, and
runs the selected action.
Coming soon
omarchy.theme-switcher— folds theme switching into the shell.