Hardware Monitor — Omarchy bar widget

Memory, CPU, and GPU in the bar. Three readouts, cycled with a right click: gauges alone, gauges with temperatures, or the numbers spelled out.

Everything is read straight from /proc and /sys inside the shell process — no polling script, no subprocess on a timer.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/edgarsilva/omarchy-hw-monitor.git --enable

Then place it where you want it and restart the shell:

omarchy bar move io.github.edgarsilva.hw-monitor --section right --after omarchy.tray
omarchy restart shell

Nothing to configure — it finds this machine's sensors on its own.

Usage

• Left click — opens btop, floating and centred, through omarchy-launch-or-focus-tui, so a second click focuses the window you already have rather than opening another.
• Right click — cycles compact → full → labels, and remembers it.
• Middle click — resamples immediately.
• Hover — says what the clicks do, and nothing more. The full breakdown is a status call away (see IPC).

The three readouts

compact — a glyph and a gauge per component, ~80px. The gauge fills from the bottom and warms toward the theme's urgent colour as load climbs, so the machine's state is readable without reading a digit.

full — the same, plus CPU and GPU temperature, ~106px. Memory has no temperature sensor, so its gauge is the whole readout.

labels — the Waybar hardware group, tightened: no glyph, no gauge, each label welded to its figure, ~230px.

What it reads

An NVIDIA card is the exception: it reports none of this through sysfs, so it is polled through nvidia-smi on the same interval.

How it samples

Sensor paths are found once, at load, by hw-probe — a small shell script, because working out which files a machine exposes means globbing hwmon and matching labels, and every vendor names its sensors differently. After that there is no forking on a timer the way a Waybar custom module does: the widget reads the resolved files directly with FileView, which is what makes a two-second interval reasonable for something that runs for the life of your session.

blockAllReads is set on those views deliberately. Without it reload() is asynchronous and text() returns the previous tick's contents, so every readout lags a full interval. These are kernel-generated files of a few KB, so a blocking read never stalls the UI.

Run the probe yourself to see what it found:

~/.config/omarchy/plugins/io.github.edgarsilva.hw-monitor/hw-probe | jq

A sensor missing from that output is one this machine does not expose, and the widget renders a dash rather than a zero that looks like real data.

Settings

Set per bar entry in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json. They apply on save.

{
  "id": "io.github.edgarsilva.hw-monitor",
  "mode": "labels",
  "percentPad": "zero",
  "gpuIconRotation": 90
}

Colours are not configurable on purpose. A reading only ever draws in the theme's foreground mixed toward its urgent colour in proportion to load, so it stays coherent across every Omarchy theme rather than pinning a green/amber/red ramp that would clash with half of them.

Two instances are allowed, so a machine with two GPUs can show both:

{ "id": "io.github.edgarsilva.hw-monitor", "showRam": false, "showCpu": false, "gpu": "0" },
{ "id": "io.github.edgarsilva.hw-monitor", "showRam": false, "showCpu": false, "gpu": "1" }

Why a percentage is padded

A percentage is one or two digits. Letting it size naturally means the group — and every widget beside it — jumps sideways each time CPU crosses 9%, several times a minute. So the column is held at a constant width, and percentPad decides how:

At exactly 100% the figure needs a fourth character in any of these, so the group widens briefly under full load.

One screen only

The bar mounts one instance of every widget per monitor, and has no per-monitor filter of its own. monitors is that filter: an instance whose screen is not listed hides itself, collapses to zero width, and stops sampling, so a bar that is crowded on a second screen can carry this widget on the first alone.

omarchy bar set io.github.edgarsilva.hw-monitor monitors DP-1

Names are Hyprland connector names — hyprctl monitors -j | jq -r '.[].name'. An instance that cannot resolve its screen yet shows rather than hides, so the widget never disappears because it was asked too early during startup.

Sizing

iconSize scales this widget alone, which leaves its glyphs out of step with the tray and audio icons beside it. If the whole bar looks small, the knob you want is the shell's type scale:

# ~/.config/omarchy/shell.toml — layered over any theme, applies on save
[font]
base-size = 14

Everything derives from that one number: bar height 26 × base/12, bar icons 13 × base/12, body text = base. Omarchy maps shell px to terminal points at pt = px × 0.75. omarchy display text size <n> writes the same key and syncs GTK and your terminal configs to it, but caps at 20px — and passing the point size you have in mind will set the shell to that many pixels and rewrite your terminals down to three quarters of it.

IPC

omarchy-shell io.github.edgarsilva.hw-monitor status      # the full breakdown
omarchy-shell io.github.edgarsilva.hw-monitor refresh     # resample now
omarchy-shell io.github.edgarsilva.hw-monitor cycleMode   # next readout

status is everything the bar does not show — CPU model and core count, load average, cache and swap, VRAM, watts, fan, clocks — as plain text, which makes it easy to hang off a keybinding:

o.bind("SUPER + CTRL + ALT + H", "Hardware",
  'notify-send "$(omarchy-shell io.github.edgarsilva.hw-monitor status)"')

Requirements

• A Nerd Font for the glyphs, which Omarchy already ships
• pciutils (lspci) — optional, only to name a card in status
• nvidia-smi — only for NVIDIA cards, installed with the driver

No pip packages, no daemon, no elevated privileges. Nothing is written outside the shell's own config; the plugin reads /proc and /sys and nothing else.

Development

The repo is the source of truth; the shell loads a plain copy from ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/<id>/. Sync and reload after an edit:

rsync -a --delete --exclude .git ./ ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/io.github.edgarsilva.hw-monitor/
omarchy restart shell

omarchy restart shell rather than a hot reload: edited plugin QML is often still served from the old instance until the shell process restarts, and omarchy-shell shell rescanPlugins will report a reload that did not visibly happen. Hot reload can also leave a stale IpcHandler registered, so an IPC or settings test against a hot-reloaded plugin can pass or fail for the wrong reason.

Symlinking the plugin directory at the workspace does not work — omarchy plugin validate refuses a plugin folder that is itself a symlink.

Validate before publishing:

omarchy plugin validate .
qmllint -I /usr/share/omarchy/shell Widget.qml Service.qml Gauge.qml

qmllint cannot resolve qs.Commons / qs.Ui from the shell root directly — those modules declare module qs.Ui from a directory named Ui/, which Quickshell maps itself. Point it at a tree shaped the way it expects:

mkdir -p /tmp/qsimports/qs
ln -s /usr/share/omarchy/shell/Ui /tmp/qsimports/qs/Ui
ln -s /usr/share/omarchy/shell/Commons /tmp/qsimports/qs/Commons
qmllint -I /tmp/qsimports -I /usr/lib/qt6/qml Widget.qml Service.qml Gauge.qml

That reports no errors. The remaining warnings are unqualified for root. read inside a Component delegate and missing-property for Style.bar.* through its QtObject — both artifacts of how qmllint resolves component scopes and Quickshell's singletons, and the shell's own widgets produce the same class.

hw-probe runs standalone, which is the fastest way to check sensor discovery on a machine without touching the shell at all:

./hw-probe | jq

If this ever stores anything

It does not today — the plugin reads /proc, /sys, and its own settings out of shell.json, and writes nothing of its own. Should that change, create the file 0600 inside a 0700 directory, created with those modes rather than chmoded after the fact — a file is readable for the moment between open and chmod, and a default umask leaves it 0644, world-readable on a shared machine. Same rule for any directory: mkdir -m 700, not mkdir then chmod.

Removal

omarchy plugin remove io.github.edgarsilva.hw-monitor

That drops it from the bar and deletes the plugin. It keeps no state and writes no files of its own, so there is nothing else to clean up.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.