Pane Manager

An Omarchy shell plugin for managing tiled panes from the bar. Resize them by dragging the divider with your mouse, see where a dragged pane will land before you drop it, set the border thickness and corner style, and put a mangled layout back the way it was.

Features

Drag the divider to resize

Turns on general:resize_on_border, so the boundary between two panes is a handle you can grab with the mouse — no modifier held, the way panes work in an IDE. The grab area is configurable, and the cursor changes shape over it so the affordance is discoverable.

See where a dragged pane will land

SUPER + dragging a pane over another one tiles it above, below or beside the target. Hyprland picks the side from your cursor but draws nothing to say which, so the result is hard to predict. Pane Manager shades the half the pane is about to take, live, while you drag.

Open a pane where the mouse is

Dropping a pane already follows your cursor. Opening one does not: Hyprland splits the focused pane on a side your config picked, and Omarchy picks right/bottom, so the mouse has no say. Open to any side makes the two the same operation — a new pane splits whatever is under the mouse, on the side the mouse is nearest.

It is one row over two Hyprland options, dwindle:smart_split and dwindle:use_active_for_splits, because neither is the behaviour on its own: the first decides the side, the second decides whether the pane under the cursor is the one being split at all. Set only the first and a new pane still lands on the focused pane, which is the surprise the row exists to remove.

Pick the layout

Hyprland ships four tiled layouts, and the Layout row shows all four as small drawings: dwindle splits the pane a new one lands in, scrolling is a niri-like row that scrolls sideways, master keeps one big pane with the rest stacked beside it, monocle shows one pane at a time. The row applies to the scope in Apply to; bin/pane-manager layout scrolling --workspace does just the active workspace, for a keybinding.

Splitting is dwindle's, so on any other layout the panel turns off what depends on it — the drop indicator, Open to any side and Drop to any side. Drag the border is layout-agnostic and keeps working, and the two resets stay available: they are the way back.

Hyprland tracks the layout per workspace, so the row writes the same per-workspace rules as Omarchy's own omarchy-hyprland-workspace-layout-toggle, in ~/.local/state/omarchy/workspace-layouts/<id>.lua. The two agree, and the choice survives a reload.

Per workspace, or everywhere

The four behaviour switches — Scrolling layout, Drag the border, Open to any side and Drop to any side — are answered per workspace on top of a global value, and Apply to at the top of the panel says which of the two you are editing:

• all writes the global value: what every workspace falls back to. Setting it drops the workspaces' own answers, so what the panel shows is what you get everywhere.
• ws <id> writes an override for that workspace alone. The chips list the workspaces you have open, and a · marks the one you are on — you can set up ws 3 from ws 1.

That is what the third state on each switch is for. Default is not a value but the absence of one: at workspace scope it hands the answer back to the global setting — the badge says which, DEFAULT · ON — and at global scope it hands it back to ~/.config/hypr/. The scope always opens on the workspace you are in, because a sticky all is how you change every workspace believing you are changing one.

Only the layout is per workspace in Hyprland itself. resize_on_border and dwindle:precise_mouse_move are single global options, so a per-workspace value means "write this when the workspace takes focus" — the plugin does exactly that, on every workspace change, without reloading anything. The border thickness, corner radius and grab area are not scoped at all: they are chrome rather than behaviour, and Hyprland has no per-workspace notion of them either.

The choices live in ~/.local/state/omarchy/pane-manager/, as global.json and overrides.json, next to a config.json snapshot of what ~/.config/hypr/ asked for — hyprctl getoption answers with the value in force rather than the configured one, and these are the options the plugin overwrites, so read live it would drift into "whatever was applied last" and Default would stop meaning anything. The snapshot is taken while the values are untouched, and again after every reload. Reset all workspaces deletes the lot.

Border thickness and corners

Width in px and Square/Round corners, applied as you change them.

Undo a mangled layout

Resizing a dwindle tree has no built-in undo. Two buttons put things back, for the current workspace or all of them: they drop any layout override, reload your Hyprland config, and restore the default split ratios — so they double as a way back from anything the panel changed.

Why

Hyprland already ships modifier-driven mouse resize, and Omarchy binds it out of the box:

What it leaves off is general:resize_on_border, which lets you grab the divider between two tiled panes directly, the way panes work in an IDE. This plugin turns that on from the bar, puts the border chrome that goes with it in the same place, and — because a resized dwindle tree has no built-in undo — gives you a way to reset the split ratios.

Dropping a dragged pane has the same gap. Hyprland can tile it above, below or beside the target depending on where your cursor is, but it draws nothing to say which, so the result feels like a coin toss. This plugin shades the half the pane is about to take, live, while you drag — see Drop indicator.

The panel

Left-clicking the bar icon opens it. Apply to sits above three tabs — Panes, Border and Reset — because it scopes the pane settings and would be easy to set and forget inside one of them. The panel reopens on the tab you left it on, until the shell restarts.

• Apply to — ws <id> or all: where the four switches in Panes write. See Per workspace, or everywhere.

Panes

• Layout — dwindle, scrolling, master or monocle, written as workspace rules. At workspace scope the tile of the global layout carries a DEFAULT pin, and choosing it drops the workspace's own answer rather than pinning it. Off dwindle, what reads a split tree goes quiet: the drop indicator stops drawing, and Open to any side and Drop to any side grey out and read off — though the Hyprland options under them are untouched and come back with dwindle.
• Drag the border — general:resize_on_border on and off, with the grab area from the settings. Off here means off, not "hand everything back": the two resets are what returns the border chrome to ~/.config/hypr/.
• Open to any side — dwindle:smart_split on and dwindle:use_active_for_splits off, together. Off, a new pane always splits the focused one on the side your config picked. On, it splits the pane under the mouse, on the side the mouse is nearest. Off writes Hyprland's own default back for the second option rather than a snapshot of yours; a config that turns use_active_for_splits off by hand gets it back from a reset.
• Drop to any side — dwindle:precise_mouse_move. Off, a dropped pane only ever tiles left or right. On, it tiles above and below too, by cursor position, and the landing spot is shaded while you drag. Gates both halves at once: the overlay stays quiet whenever this is off.

Border, session-wide: Hyprland keeps one border for every workspace, so this tab ignores Apply to.

• Thickness — border width in px (general:border_size)
• Corners — Square or Round (decoration:rounding). The shell mirrors this into its own chrome but only re-reads it at startup and on a theme change, so the plugin nudges Style.scheduleRefresh() after every change — otherwise the panel telling you "Square" would still be drawn with round corners itself.

Reset

• Reset this workspace / Reset all workspaces — drop the overrides, reload the config, then restore the default split ratios. --all drops the global values too, so it is the way back to ~/.config/hypr/ in full. They stay enabled on every layout, because they are the way back to the config's.

The border chrome is runtime-only, and the resets clear the rest, so they remain the reliable way back to your configured state.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/momoi-labs/omarchy-pane-manager.git --enable

To remove it:

omarchy plugin remove dev.momoi-labs.pane-manager

Removal takes the bar widget and the drop indicator with it and leaves nothing behind: everything the plugin changes is set at runtime, so the next Hyprland reload already has your own ~/.config/hypr/ values back. Anything you chose to persist there (see below) is yours and stays until you remove it yourself.

Requirements

Omarchy 4 (Quattro) or newer, plus two things an Omarchy install already has:

No other external dependencies, and nothing is fetched at runtime.

Persisting the settings

The three behaviour switches are persisted in the plugin's own store, and the layout also as workspace rules where Omarchy keeps them. The border thickness, corner radius and grab area are runtime-only.

Your config is still what everything falls back to — it is what Default at global scope, and both resets, land on. So it is worth putting the state you want as a starting point in ~/.config/hypr/looknfeel.lua:

hl.config({
  general = {
    resize_on_border = true,
    -- Pixels beyond the drawn border that still count as the handle. Larger is
    -- easier to grab; too large starts stealing clicks near a pane's edges.
    extend_border_grab_area = 10,
    -- Cursor changes shape over the handle, so the affordance is discoverable.
    hover_icon_on_border = true,
    -- Omarchy ships 2.
    border_size = 1,
  },

  decoration = {
    -- Omarchy ships 0, i.e. square.
    rounding = 8,
  },

  dwindle = {
    -- A dropped pane picks its side from the cursor, so it can land above and
    -- below as well as beside. The drop indicator stays dark while this is off.
    precise_mouse_move = true,
  },
})

Settings

In ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json:

{ "id": "dev.momoi-labs.pane-manager", "grabArea": 10, "roundedRadius": 8, "maxBorderSize": 12 }

CLI

The helper is usable on its own — handy for a keybinding:

BIN=~/.config/omarchy/plugins/dev.momoi-labs.pane-manager/bin/pane-manager
$BIN state                # JSON: what Hyprland reports now, plus the store
$BIN set <key> <value> [--workspace [id] | --all] [--grab <px>]
$BIN apply [--grab <px>]  # write what the active workspace asks for
$BIN border <px>          # global
$BIN corners <px>         # global; 0 = square
$BIN reset [--all]        # overrides, config, then split ratios

set takes layout (dwindle, scrolling, master, monocle, default), and drag, dropside and openside (on, off, default), and defaults to --all. So a keybinding that flips just the workspace you are on is:

$BIN set layout scrolling --workspace

apply is what the panel runs on every workspace change, to write the global options that workspace asked for. You only need it by hand if you drive the store from somewhere else.

These still work, for keybindings written against 1.0:

$BIN enable [grabArea]    # = set drag on --all
$BIN disable              # = clears drag, and reverts border chrome to config
$BIN toggle [grabArea]
$BIN dropside <bool>      # = set dropside on|off --all
$BIN layout <dwindle|scrolling|master|monocle> [--workspace | --all]

Drop indicator

With dwindle:precise_mouse_move on, dragging a pane and dropping it on another tiles it above, below, or beside the target depending on where the cursor is — but Hyprland draws nothing to say which. This plugin shades the half the pane is about to occupy, live, while you drag.

Two things make that possible without a compositor plugin:

• Drag detection with no polling. Hyprland publishes no drag event, but dragging a tiled window flips it to floating for the duration of the drag (DragController.cpp, changeFloatingMode in updateDragWindow/dragEnd), and that flip is announced on socket2 as changefloatingmode. Drag start and end arrive as push events; the cursor is only polled in between. A manual float toggle is told apart from a drag by the fact that a drag first centres the window on the cursor.
• The landing side is reproducible. DwindleAlgorithm.cpp decides it from the cursor against the target box's centre, with the box's own diagonals as the threshold. bin/drop-indicator mirrors that, and the indicator paints the result — the half the new pane gets — rather than the triangles that pick it.

Because that rule is mirrored rather than queried, it is pinned to a Hyprland version in the helper (HYPRLAND_RULE_VERIFIED_ON). If the compositor changes how it decides, the indicator lies, which is worse than showing nothing — so it is worth rechecking on major Hyprland updates.

The shaded rectangle takes its corner radius from decoration:rounding, so the preview has the shape the pane will actually get rather than the shell theme's.

The overlay's input region is empty, so it can never swallow the drag it draws.

What this plugin does not do

Moving panes with the mouse is already Hyprland's, and there is no modifier-free version of it to add: a tiled pane has no titlebar to grab, so the modifier is what tells the compositor you mean the window rather than its contents. Omarchy binds it out of the box:

Tests

tests/run            # the helper, against a fake hyprctl; needs bash and jq
tests/run layout     # only the tests whose name matches
tests/live 2         # the panel, live: opens it on workspace 2 and screenshots it

tests/run gives every test an empty store and a fake compositor (tests/fake/hyprctl) that answers queries from a JSON file and records every call. Tests assert on the store the helper leaves behind and on what it asked Hyprland to do. tests/live swaps the plugin symlink to this checkout, restarts the shell, and puts both back; the screenshot is the check. See ADR 0004 for why the split.

Notes for hackers

Omarchy 4 runs Hyprland's Lua config parser, which retires the legacy hyprctl forms. Anything poking at Hyprland from a plugin needs the new spelling:

Boolean options come back as .bool in hyprctl getoption -j; .int is null for them. The full Lua API is stubbed at /usr/share/hypr/stubs/hl.meta.lua.

Three more things worth knowing before you script against Hyprland:

• hyprctl exits 0 when a dispatcher fails. It prints error: … on stdout and returns success anyway, so a set -e script sails straight past a broken dispatch. Check the output.
• splitratio takes a delta, and dwindle has no exact (at least through 0.56.2 — splitratio exact 1 answers failed to parse "exact" as a delta). There is no "set this node to 1.0" message. Ratios clamp to [0.1, 1.9] though, so splitratio -5 lands on a known 0.1 and splitratio +0.9 reaches the default. That two-hop is how the reset here works.
• fc-query's charset can lie about Nerd Font glyphs. It reported U+F006E (nf-md-backup_restore) as covered by JetBrainsMono Nerd Font; it renders as tofu. Screenshot your widget before trusting a glyph.

License

MIT