arthur-os/docs/omarchy-shell.md

omarchy-shell

A single long-running Quickshell instance that hosts the Omarchy desktop. The bar, panels, overlays, menus, and services all run inside as plugins. IPC is the canonical way for CLIs to talk to a running shell — omarchy-shell-ipc auto-starts it on first call.

Plugin manifest

{
  "schemaVersion": 1,
  "id": "my.org.cool-clock",
  "name": "Cool clock",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "author": "You",
  "description": "A clock that does cool things",
  "kinds": ["bar-widget"],
  "entryPoints": { "barWidget": "Widget.qml" }
}

kinds (a manifest may declare more than one):

Kind	What it is
bar-widget	Component the bar drops into a section
panel	Floating window (e.g. OSD)
overlay	Fullscreen overlay (e.g. background picker)
menu	Summoned menu surface
service	Headless singleton, no UI

Panels, overlays, and menus are loaded when summoned. Plugins can set keepLoaded: true to survive between summons. First-party services are loaded at startup.

Full schema: shell/services/PluginRegistry.qml.

Installing a third-party plugin

Plugins come from source repos — a git repo where every top-level folder is a plugin with its own manifest.json. Trust a repo, then install from it:

omarchy plugin source add https://github.com/owner/omarchy-plugins.git
omarchy plugin available             # what your sources offer
omarchy plugin add some-widget       # validate, copy, offer to enable
omarchy plugin update --all          # shows a diff before applying
omarchy plugin remove some-widget

Plugins run as unsandboxed code inside omarchy-shell. Adding a source and installing both warn you and let you review the manifest, the files, and (on update) a diff before anything is copied or enabled. Commands prompt when run bare in a terminal and run unattended when given arguments — add --yes to skip every prompt (the path for scripts and agents).

Sources are recorded in ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/sources.json and cloned into ~/.cache/omarchy/plugin-sources/. You can still install by hand: drop a plugin into ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/<id>/, run omarchy plugin rescan, then omarchy plugin enable <id> (bar widgets also need omarchy plugin bar add <id>). The lower-level IPC methods remain available through omarchy-shell shell ....

IPC

The shell exposes a shell target plus extra targets registered by individual plugins (bar, image-selector, …).

Method	Effect
ping	health check
summon <id> <payloadJson>	load + open a plugin
hide <id>	close a previously-summoned
toggle <id> <payloadJson>	summon if closed, hide if open
call <id> <method> <arg>	call an already-loaded plugin
rescanPlugins	re-walk plugin dirs
reloadConfig	reload shell.json
setPluginEnabled <id> <"true"|…>	flip enabled bit
listPlugins	JSON of every discovered plugin

setPluginEnabled takes a string; only literal "true" enables.

shell.json

{
  "version": 1,
  "idle": {
    "screensaver": 150,
    "lock": 300
  },
  "bar": {
    "position": "top",
    "transparent": false,
    "centerAnchor": "calendar",
    "fontFamily": "JetBrainsMono Nerd Font",
    "layout": {
      "left":   [ { "id": "omarchy.menu" } ],
      "center": [ { "id": "omarchy.clock", "format": "HH:mm" } ],
      "right":  [ { "id": "omarchy.audio" } ]
    }
  },
  "plugins": [
    { "id": "community.weather-extra" }
  ]
}

Rules:

1. Every plugin instance is one entry — bar.layout.<section> for bar widgets, plugins[] for everything else.
2. Settings are inline on the entry. No config: sub-object, no merge layers.
3. Built-in bar widget ids are namespaced (omarchy.clock, omarchy.audio, …). The migration rewrites older ids such as Clock and AudioPanel forward.
4. Third-party enabled ⇔ present; first-party plugins are always enabled.
5. allowMultiple: true in the manifest permits multiple instances.
6. idle.screensaver and idle.lock are seconds since user idle began.
7. version: 1 is required.

config/omarchy/shell.json describes the fresh-install state. When no user shell.json exists, defaults are used verbatim. Once the user customizes, shell.json is canonical — there is no deep-merge.

Theme tokens

Themes ship colors in themes/<name>/colors.toml and surface roles + sizing in themes/<name>/shell.toml. Defaults are generated from default/themed/shell.toml.tpl; a theme may also drop a hand-written shell.toml next to its colors.toml to override individual keys.

The shell exposes these tokens to QML via two singletons in qs.Commons:

• Color — palette (foreground, background, accent, urgent) and per-surface roles (Color.bar.*, Color.popups.*, Color.tooltip.*, Color.notifications.*, Color.menu.*, Color.launcher.*, Color.imagePicker.*, Color.polkit.*, Color.lock.*). Clipboard and emojis share Color.menu.*.
• Style — structural tokens (cornerRadius), shared interactive state tokens/helpers, spacing (Style.spacing.* / Style.space(px)), the type scale (Style.font.*), and bar dimensions (Style.bar.sizeHorizontal / Style.bar.sizeVertical).

Interactive states

[controls] standardizes reusable control chrome (buttons, dropdowns, tab strips, etc.) around four states: normal, hover-cursor, focus, and selected. State colors accept palette roles (foreground, accent, urgent, background) or hex strings; the default template ships hex values. Fill/border alphas are applied to that state's color.

Surfaces like [menu], [launcher], and [image-picker] define their own selected-* tokens and do not inherit from [controls]. [controls] only governs the shared button/dropdown chrome.

State	Color token	Fill alpha	Border width	Border alpha
Normal idle chrome	normal-color	normal-fill-alpha	normal-border-width	normal-border-alpha
Hover / keyboard cursor	hover-cursor-color	hover-cursor-fill-alpha	hover-cursor-border-width	hover-cursor-border-alpha
Qt activeFocus	focus-color	focus-fill-alpha	focus-border-width	focus-border-alpha
Persistent selected/current	selected-color	selected-fill-alpha	selected-border-width	selected-border-alpha

The template ships focus-* adjacent to hover-cursor-* with the same values so mouse hover, keyboard cursor, and tab focus read identically. Themes that want focus to stand out override the four focus-* keys.

Border widths are the theme-level on/off switches for state borders; set a width to 0 to keep the fill while removing that state border. The default keeps selected borders off globally (selected-border-width = 0); explicitly bordered controls keep their normal border when selected.

[controls]
# Accent-tinted cursor/focus, foreground-tinted selected state.
hover-cursor-color = "accent"
focus-color        = "accent"
selected-color     = "foreground"

# Keep selected fills but remove selected-state borders.
selected-border-width = 0

Momentary fills use pressed-fill-alpha for button press feedback and selection-fill-alpha for text selection. Themes may also provide pressed-color or selection-color; they fall back to hover-cursor and foreground respectively.

The section was previously named [style]. Hand-written theme shell.toml files using the old name still apply — the parser accepts both [controls] and [style].

Spacing

[spacing] scale multiplies the shell's shared margins, gaps, padding, control sizes, and panel dimensions. The default is 1.0; values above 1.0 create more breathing room while values below 1.0 make controls dense. By default scale-with-font = true, so increasing [font] base-size also scales buttons, popup widths, row heights, and panel padding proportionally.

[spacing]
scale = 1.15
scale-with-font = true  # grow controls and panels with [font] base-size

QML components should prefer semantic tokens where possible:

Token	Default use
Style.spacing.controlPaddingX / controlPaddingY	Button and tooltip padding
Style.spacing.inputPaddingY	Text-field vertical padding
Style.spacing.controlHeight / popupRowHeight	Dropdown and number-field row heights
Style.spacing.dropdownWidth / searchableDropdownWidth / numberFieldWidth	Default field widths
Style.spacing.searchablePopupMinHeight	Minimum searchable dropdown popup height
Style.spacing.controlGap	Gap between icon and label inside controls
Style.spacing.labelGap	Label-to-control and compact list gaps
Style.spacing.rowGap / rowPaddingX	Form rows and list row content
Style.spacing.panelGap / panelPadding	Panel section spacing and interior padding
Style.spacing.popupPadding	Popout interior padding

Popout placement deliberately follows Hyprland's general:gaps_out (Style.gapsOut) so panels align with tiled windows. Use a theme's hyprland.lua to change that outer alignment; [spacing] controls the interior breathing room.

For one-off proportional constants, use Style.space(px) to preserve the old default at scale 1.0 and base-size = 12 while still responding to the theme scale and font scale. Use Style.spaceReal(px) only for fractional geometry that should not be rounded, such as bar widget text margins. Themes can override any semantic token directly in [spacing], e.g.:

[spacing]
scale = 1.0
panel-padding = 22
row-gap = 10

Typography

[font] base-size is the rem root for the scale. Every Style.font.<token> derives from it via a fixed multiplier, so bumping base-size rescales the whole shell proportionally:

Token	Multiplier	Default
Style.font.caption	0.833	10
Style.font.bodySmall	0.917	11
Style.font.body	1.0	12
Style.font.subtitle	1.083	13
Style.font.title	1.167	14
Style.font.heading	1.333	16
Style.font.display	2.0	24
Style.font.displayLarge	2.333	28
Style.font.iconSmall	bodySmall	11
Style.font.icon	title	14
Style.font.iconLarge	1.5	18

A theme can either scale everything by tweaking base-size:

[font]
base-size = 13   # roomier

…or pin individual tokens for stylistic emphasis without affecting the rest of the scale:

[font]
base-size = 12
heading       = 20
display-large = 36

Recognized override keys: base-size, caption, body-small, body, subtitle, title, heading, display, display-large, icon-small, icon, icon-large.

base-size has no upper clamp; the shell only floors it at 1px to avoid nonsensical zero/negative sizes. Per-token overrides aren't clamped either. The shell font family is the fontconfig monospace alias — themes don't set it, the user does via omarchy font set <name>.

Bar size

[bar] size-horizontal / size-vertical set the cross-axis dimension of top/bottom and left/right bars respectively, measured at the default 12px font base. By default scale-with-font = true, so increasing [font] base-size also increases the bar's cross-axis size:

[bar]
scale-with-font = true
size-horizontal = 26   # top/bottom bar height at base-size 12
size-vertical   = 28   # left/right bar width at base-size 12

Set scale-with-font = false to keep those bar sizes as fixed pixels.

Custom bar modules

If a full plugin is overkill, declare a one-off module inline in bar.layout.<section>:

{ "id": "vpn", "type": "command", "exec": "~/.config/omarchy/bar/scripts/vpn-status",
  "interval": 5, "tooltip": "VPN", "onClick": "nm-connection-editor" }

Output is plain text or Waybar-style JSON ({ "text": ..., "tooltip": ..., "class": ... }).

For a custom QML widget:

{ "id": "gpu", "type": "qml" }

Then ~/.config/omarchy/bar/modules/gpu.qml (or set source to point elsewhere). The module is an Item and receives bar, moduleName, settings properties. bar exposes foreground / background / urgent / fontFamily / position / vertical / barSize, plus run(cmd), shellQuote(v), showTooltip(t, s) / hideTooltip(t), requestPopout(o) / releasePopout(o).