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MBTA

by Christopher Garay

Live MBTA arrival times for your stations in the Omarchy bar — subway, Silver Line, bus, commuter rail, and ferry countdowns with a departure-board panel and station picker (search by name or scan around any address).

GitHub

Security review

No obvious issues detected

Deterministic scan — not a security guarantee

None
Risk level
None
Analyzed commit
862d03b
Scanned
1 month ago

No potentially dangerous behavior detected in the analyzed commit.

Automated analysis only — not a security guarantee.

AI advisory review

No obvious issues detected

Language-model assessment · ~deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-latest — advisory only

None
AI risk level
None
Recommendation
install
Model
~deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-latest
Analyzed commit
862d03b
Reviewed
1 month ago

The plugin is a well-structured MBTA transit widget that only makes network requests to allowlisted endpoints (MBTA API and Nominatim) through a bounded Python helper with strict URL validation, byte limits, and rate limiting. No obfuscation, credential handling, destructive commands, or hidden persistence were found. The deterministic scan found no issues, and the independent review agrees.

How this check works

This review combines the deterministic scan (the rule-based results above) with an independent look at the plugin's code by a language model. The model reads a trimmed sample of the repository's files, the manifest, and the README, then gives a plain-language risk level and a recommendation: install (no notable danger), review (look closer first), or avoid (clearly dangerous).

It runs on the same analyzed commit as the deterministic scan and is strictly advisory — it is not a security guarantee and never blocks a plugin by itself. A human moderator still reviews plugins before they are listed.

AI advisory only — automated analysis, not a security guarantee.

Install
$ omarchy plugin add https://github.com/cgaray/omarchy-MBTA --enable
Widgets #bar #quickshell

MBTA for Omarchy

Live MBTA departure times in the Omarchy bar. A T badge with the next departure across your stations; click it for a full departure board — subway, Silver Line, bus, commuter rail, and ferry, with real-time countdowns and the MBTA's official route colors.

preview

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/cgaray/omarchy-MBTA.git --enable

Usage

  • Bar pill shows the next departure at any configured stop, or the exact station and destination row pinned from the panel. Middle/right click forces a refresh.
  • Click the pill to open the board: departures grouped per station and route/direction. Selecting a row opens a scrollable stop-order strip with live vehicle markers; tap a marker for that vehicle's label and position.
  • Pin in the line pane makes that station and destination feed the bar countdown until it is unpinned.
  • Manage stations opens the picker:
    • By name — search every station in the system ("Davis", "North Station").
    • Near address — type your address, place, or raw lat,lon, set a radius in km, and hit Find. When several places match the name, candidates are listed so you can pick the right one. The location is saved for future sessions; ⌖ Saved location reuses it without retyping.
  • Selected stations persist in shell.json (per-widget settings) and survive restarts.

Late at night, when real-time predictions go quiet, the board falls back to scheduled times and says so in the footer.

Keyboard: Esc closes (clears the search field first), Tab switches panels, and ↑/↓+Enter select results in the name picker.

Configure

Everything lives in the widget's settings entry:

omarchy bar move io.github.cgaray.mbta --section right
Setting Default What it does
stopIds Downtown Boston five Stations on the board (the picker edits this)
refreshSec 60 Prediction fetch interval (60–300s)
perGroupCap 3 Countdown chips kept per route/direction row
scheduleFallback true Show scheduled times when predictions are empty
pinnedLine empty Internal station/line selection set by the panel's Pin control
lastAddress empty Your saved address, place, or coordinates for nearby stations

The plugin uses anonymous MBTA access and does not store API credentials.

IPC

omarchy-shell io.github.cgaray.mbta toggle     # open/close the panel
omarchy-shell io.github.cgaray.mbta refresh    # force a fetch
omarchy-shell io.github.cgaray.mbta status     # JSON summary of the board
omarchy-shell shell summon io.github.cgaray.mbta '{}'

Data sources

  • MBTA V3 API — predictions, schedules, stops, nearby search, trips, and vehicles. No key required for light use.
  • OpenStreetMap Nominatim — address → coordinates for the "near address" flow (sends an identifying User-Agent).

Predictions are requested at startup and every 60–300 seconds (60 seconds by default). Empty predictions may use a schedule response cached for five minutes. A visible line view requests vehicles every 60 seconds; polling stops when the panel or line view is hidden. All MBTA requests share a conservative rolling budget of 12 requests per minute, below the anonymous API limit of 20; throttled line details retry without sending additional requests. Address requests only occur after the corresponding user action.

Selected stop IDs, the optional pinned line, picker mode, radius, and saved location are retained in Omarchy's widget settings. Removing the plugin may leave its widget settings in Omarchy's shell configuration; clear the saved location and pin in the panel before removal if desired.

Runtime dependencies: Python 3 and the standard library. Network responses are fetched through the bundled allowlisted adapter with endpoint-specific byte and time limits.

Development

The repo is the plugin; sync it into place after edits:

./dev-sync.sh          # rsync into ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/io.github.cgaray.mbta
omarchy-restart-shell  # cold reload (rescanPlugins can serve stale QML)
journalctl --user -t omarchy-shell   # plugin QML errors land here
./tests/run.sh         # node tests + contract checks + qmllint

Remove

omarchy plugin remove io.github.cgaray.mbta

License

MIT — see LICENSE.