Omarchycast

A keyboard launcher for Omarchy. One hotkey, one field.

Raycast-style calculations work directly in the search bar — type 1920 * 0.85 or 25 GB to MB and the answer is the first result, no mode to switch into and no calculator to open. Alongside that: fuzzy app search that learns what you actually open, date arithmetic, and your markdown notes, all in the same list.

Dates are answered in the same field, with no mode to switch into:

Omarchy, searchable	Theme switching

Plugins beside system entries

Why it is built this way

Omarchycast is a Quickshell overlay plugin, so the interface runs inside the Omarchy shell process that is already on screen rather than in a browser engine of its own. Search itself lives in a small Rust daemon that keeps the app index in memory and answers over a unix socket.

The result is a launcher that costs about 9 MB resident and answers a keystroke in ~0.4 ms, including the round trip. An equivalent build on a webview stack measured 356 MB across three processes on the same machine.

   CTRL + SPACE
        │
        ▼
  Omarchycast.qml ── overlay, inside the running Quickshell process
        │         layer-shell, exclusive keyboard focus
        │  newline-delimited JSON over $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/omarchycast.sock
        ▼
  omarchycastd ───── app index · fuzzy + frecency · calculator · dates · notes

What it does

Type this	You get
firefox	Fuzzy app search, ranked by how often and how recently you launch things
1920 * 0.85	1632 — Enter copies it
25 GB to MB, 5 miles to km, 0xff to decimal, 15% of 240	Unit, base and percentage conversion
days until october 8	41 days — until Thursday, 8 October 2026
30 days from now, 2 weeks ago	The resulting date
checklist	Your markdown notes, matched on title and body
note Groceries	Creates that note and opens it
clipboard	Opens Omarchy's clipboard manager
nightlight, suspend, screenshot	Omarchy itself: every menu entry, runnable omarchy command, and installed theme
theme catppuccin	Switches the Omarchy theme
settings	The settings pane

Ranking is fuzzy relevance first, with a frecency boost — usage damped logarithmically and decayed on a 14-day half-life — so familiar apps rise without ever outranking a clearly better textual match. An empty query lists what you open most.

On first open you get a short tour: six example queries you can press ↵ on to run for real, rather than a page of instructions. Type tour to see it again.

Keys

Key	Action
↑ ↓, Ctrl+N Ctrl+P	Move through results (wraps)
↵	Open, or copy for calculator and date rows
⇧↵	Copy a calculation together with its expression
Ctrl+,	Settings
Esc	Clear the query, then dismiss

Install

Requires Omarchy (Quickshell 0.3+), Hyprland, and a Rust toolchain to build the daemon. wl-clipboard is needed for copying.

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/Aditya-Raj-Tiwari/omarchycast.git --enable
cd ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/io.github.aditya-raj-tiwari.omarchycast
make install
omarchycastd hotkey 'CTRL + SPACE'

omarchycastd hotkey writes ~/.config/hypr/omarchycast.lua and adds one dofile line to hyprland.lua. Wayland has no client-side global hotkey, so the binding has to live in the compositor's config; keeping it in its own file makes it easy to see and to remove.

Start the daemon at login by adding it to ~/.config/hypr/autostart.lua:

hl.exec_once("omarchycastd")

The overlay also starts the daemon on demand if it isn't running.

Settings

Ctrl+, or type settings. Everything is stored in ~/.config/omarchycast/config.json and applies immediately.

• Hotkey — click the field, press a combination; it rewrites the Hyprland binding and reloads.
• Sources — enable apps, calculator, dates, notes, plugins and Omarchy individually, cap how many rows each contributes, and set the notes folder.
• Appearance — width, visible rows, corner radius, whether to follow the Omarchy theme, compact or comfortable density, and a font size control (70–160 %).
• Behaviour — dismiss on click-away, what Escape does, and whether an empty query lists frequent apps.

Notes

Notes are markdown files in ~/Notes (configurable). Titles come from the first # heading, falling back to the filename. Typing note <title> creates one and opens it straight away, so capturing a thought is a single keystroke.

Notes open in Omacastnotes, the floating markdown viewer bundled in notesapp/ (formerly shadow-notes) and installed by make install:

omacastnotes                 # the scratchpad
omacastnotes ~/Notes/foo.md  # a specific note

Each note gets its own instance id, so opening a second note gives it a new window while re-opening the same note focuses the one already on screen.

Titles are matched fuzzily and body text literally — a fuzzy match against a whole document scores almost anything and buries the note you meant.

Omarchy, searchable

The launcher indexes Omarchy itself: every entry of the Omarchy menu (with its breadcrumb, e.g. System › Suspend), every documented omarchy command that can run without arguments (from omarchy commands --json), and one row per installed theme. Menu actions that are plain commands run directly; anything with shell syntax falls back to summoning the menu at that entry, which is the surface built to run it. Commands that need elevated privileges or mandatory arguments are not indexed — the launcher never invokes a privilege boundary.

Plugins

Drop a JSON manifest into ~/.config/omarchycast/plugins/ and its commands join the results — no recompiling. A manifest can contribute static commands, fuzzy-matched like applications:

{
  "name": "System",
  "commands": [
    { "title": "Lock screen", "glyph": "🔒", "exec": ["omarchy-lock-screen"] },
    { "title": "Copy hostname", "copy": "my-host" }
  ]
}

and an optional dynamic source: a keyword plus a query argv, run only when the query starts with that keyword. The script receives the rest of the query as its final argument and prints one JSON object per line — {"title": "…", "copy": "…"} or {"title": "…", "exec": ["cmd", "arg"]}.

Commands are argv arrays, never shell strings. Dynamic scripts run only when their keyword is typed, under a 700 ms budget and a 64 KB output cap, and are killed on overrun. Manifests are hot-reloaded when the directory changes. What an installed plugin's own programs do is the user's business — the daemon bounds what it reads from them, not what they are.

Clipboard

Omarchy already ships a clipboard manager, so Omarchycast does not keep a second history. Typing clipboard opens Omarchy's own overlay instead.

Uninstall

make uninstall
omarchy plugin remove io.github.aditya-raj-tiwari.omarchycast

Then delete the two Added by omarchycast lines from ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.lua.

Development

make dev     # symlink the working tree into the plugin dir, then rescan
make test    # daemon unit tests
make check   # clippy + omarchy plugin validate
omarchycastd eval '25 GB to MB'    # exercise the engines without the UI

Adding a search source means implementing one trait in daemon/src/providers/:

pub trait Provider: Send + Sync {
    fn id(&self) -> &'static str;
    fn query(&self, q: &Query) -> Vec<Item>;
    fn activate(&self, id: &str, action: Action) -> Result<Outcome>;
    fn reindex(&self) {}
}

query runs on every keystroke and must stay in the sub-millisecond range — build the index in reindex, never in query.

Licence

MIT