Alternative Clock

A second clock for the Omarchy bar. It sits beside the clock you already run and shows what time it is somewhere else — one zone or several — with a panel that lists each zone's time, date, and distance from your local time.

It does not replace or modify your existing clock widget. It is an ordinary bar widget that you place next to one.

[ ☰ ] [ 1 2 3 ]      Thu 15 Aug 14:32   NYC 17:32 · Tokyo 06:32
                     └── your clock      └── this plugin

Requirements

• Omarchy Quattro (omarchy-shell)
• The system time-zone database, plus date and test from coreutils

Nothing else is downloaded, built, or written outside your own shell configuration.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/chagel/omarchy-alternative-clock.git --enable

Then place it in the bar. To put it directly after an existing clock widget:

omarchy plugin enable chagel.alternative-clock center --after omarchy.clock

--section left|center|right, --index N, --before <id> and --after <id> all work; so does dragging the widget along the bar once it is visible.

Remove

omarchy plugin remove chagel.alternative-clock

That deletes the plugin folder and drops its entry from the bar layout. If you edited ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json by hand, remove the widget's entry from bar.layout as well.

Configure

The quickest way is the gear in the panel: open the clock and click it to get a settings page that lists your zones and searches the system's own zone table.

Every change is written straight back to shell.json. Switching every zone off leaves a clock glyph in the bar rather than an empty widget, so the settings page never becomes unreachable.

Everything is editable by hand too. Settings live on the widget's own entry in bar.layout inside ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json:

{
  "id": "chagel.alternative-clock",
  "zones": [
    "America/New_York",
    { "zone": "Asia/Tokyo", "label": "HQ" },
    { "zone": "Europe/Berlin", "bar": false }
  ],
  "format": "HH:mm"
}

A zone with no explicit label is named after its city: America/New_York becomes New York. Each entry may be a plain name or an object with label (the name shown in the bar) and bar (false keeps it in the panel only). Only what differs from the default is written back, so a plain list of names stays a plain list of names.

Interactions

Right and middle click both write the result back to shell.json, so what the bar shows and what the config stores stay the same thing.

In the panel, the gear opens settings, s toggles it, r refreshes, and Esc closes.

The zone catalogue comes from zone1970.tab in the system time-zone database. If that file is missing, the search reports it and you can still type a full zone name and press Enter — it is checked against the system before it is added.

Format tokens

A subset of Qt's date format vocabulary, plus two tokens a foreign zone needs:

Weekday and month names follow your locale. Single quotes escape literal text the way they do in Qt formats, so HH'h'mm renders as 06h14 and '' is one apostrophe.

How time zones are resolved

Qt's QML engine ships no Intl, and its Date.toLocaleString silently ignores a timeZone option rather than rejecting it — a clock built on that would confidently render your local time under another city's name. So this plugin asks the only component on the machine that knows the real rules: the system time-zone database.

A zone is resolved by running date once with TZ set to that zone. The zone name is passed as an environment value, never as part of a shell string. The resulting UTC offset and abbreviation are cached, and the times you see are computed from that offset — so the widget does no work between refreshes beyond arithmetic.

Only a daylight-saving transition can change the answer, so re-asking is rare: every zone is resolved at startup, a newly added one when it appears, and all of them every refreshMinutes and whenever the panel is opened. Renaming a zone, hiding it, reordering, or cycling the label format re-probes nothing.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• A zone that is not in the database is shown as unknown time zone rather than silently falling back to UTC.
• A daylight-saving change in a displayed zone is picked up at the next refresh, so it can be up to refreshMinutes late. Opening the panel always refreshes first. Lower refreshMinutes if that matters to you.

Commands

omarchy-shell alternative-clock toggle       # open or close the panel
omarchy-shell alternative-clock open
omarchy-shell alternative-clock close
omarchy-shell alternative-clock settings     # open straight onto the settings page
omarchy-shell alternative-clock refresh      # re-read the clock and re-probe zones
omarchy-shell alternative-clock cycleFormat  # same as right click
omarchy-shell alternative-clock cycleZone    # same as middle click

Development

The time math and label formatting live in Model.js, kept free of Qt and of locale data so they can be tested on their own:

node --test

BarWidget.qml owns the bar label and the zone probing, Panel.qml is a read-out of the same rows plus the settings page, and SettingsView.qml is pure presentation — it reads state and emits intent, never writing shell.json itself.

To work on the plugin against a live shell, keep the folder in ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/chagel.alternative-clock/. Note that editing a .qml file is not enough on its own: the QML engine caches compiled components by URL, so the running shell keeps the version it started with. Apply changes with:

omarchy restart shell

omarchy-shell shell rescanPlugins re-runs discovery, which is enough for a newly added or removed plugin folder but not for edited QML.

License

MIT.