Curtain

Notices when you start sharing your screen. Takes your notifications off it, hands them back when the capture ends, keeps the screen awake, and wears a badge you cannot miss until it does.

Raised. It names what is being shared and what it is holding back.

Then it puts everything back exactly as it was.

The problem it solves

Everyone has leaked a notification in a call. The fix is always the same and always manual: turn on Do Not Disturb before you share, remember to turn it off after. Nobody remembers either half.

Hyprland already announces every capture as it starts and stops. Curtain listens.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/fernandomenolli/omarchy-curtain.git --enable

Needs Omarchy 4 and Hyprland 0.56+. No other dependency.

Remove

omarchy plugin remove io.github.fernandomenolli.curtain

It writes nothing outside $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, which the system clears at logout.

What happens when you share

The bar while a capture is running, with the curtain drawn shut in red.

When the capture ends, each of those is restored to what it was before. A machine already in Do Not Disturb before the call stays that way after it.

Where your notifications go

Do Not Disturb in Omarchy does not hold anything back. A notification that arrives while it is on is dropped: no popup, no history entry, gone. That is the right behaviour for a screen share, and it is what Curtain uses, because anything that renders and is then dismissed can still be caught by a frame of the recording.

It does mean the safe half and the honest half are not the same thing, so Curtain does the other half itself. While the curtain is up it listens to the bus that carries notifications, which still carries every one of them whatever the shell decides to do about it, and when the capture ends it hands them back.

Two do not come back, because they were on your screen at the time: Omarchy lets omarchy-action and a critical notify-send through Do Not Disturb. Past twenty, the rest are counted rather than shown.

What comes back is the application, the title and the text. The original icon and any buttons it carried are not part of it.

If your machine was already in Do Not Disturb before the capture started, it stays that way afterwards and nothing is handed back — putting notifications on a screen whose owner asked for quiet is not a favour.

Screenshots are ignored. A screenshot is a capture too, and Hyprland announces grim exactly like it announces a call. Nothing arms until a capture has lasted longer than the grace period.

By hand

The icon sits in the bar whether or not anything is being shared. It was hidden at first, on the grounds that Omarchy already has both switches in its own menu, Notifications and Stay Awake — but a plugin with nothing in the bar is one you cannot open, cannot configure, and cannot tell is installed. Turn Keep the icon in the bar off once it has earned your trust.

What Omarchy does not have is anything that notices a capture starting, or remembers to undo itself when it ends. That is the whole of this.

Right click the icon to draw the curtain by hand, for a colleague at your desk or a screen on a train, or bind it:

-- ~/.config/hypr/bindings/curtain.lua
o.bind("SUPER + SHIFT + P", "Curtain",
  "omarchy-shell io.github.fernandomenolli.curtain raise")

If the shell restarts while the curtain is up, it adopts the raise rather than forgetting it. A silenced machine with nothing on screen explaining why is the one outcome worth engineering against.

Settings

Open the panel and they are switches. Tapping one takes effect straight away and is remembered in ~/.local/state/omarchy/plugins/io.github.fernandomenolli.curtain/preferences.json.

Omarchy has no settings screen, and the shell hands a plugin a copy of its settings precisely so that changing them in place cannot leak back to disk. So the panel keeps its own file rather than writing yours. If you would rather set them in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json, a key on this widget's entry still works and is what the switches start from:

{
  "id": "io.github.fernandomenolli.curtain",
  "showWhenIdle": false
}

Delete the preferences file and the panel goes back to whatever shell.json says.

What it costs

Measured on the machine this was built on, an AMD box with 24 cores running Omarchy 4.0.0.alpha and Hyprland 0.56.2. The method is to read utime + stime from /proc/<pid>/stat for the omarchy-shell process, with the plugin enabled and then disabled, and take the difference. You can repeat it in four lines of shell.

The shell's own cost dominates everything here. 2.8 ms of that per focus switch is Omarchy itself: the bar redrawing, the active-window widget, the workspace indicators. All five of these plugins together add 0.17 ms on top.

It does not get heavier as it runs. It listens for capture events and does nothing else. There is no state that accumulates.

Tests

node tests/run.js

They cover model/: parsing Hyprland's capture events, including titles with commas in them, and counting overlapping captures so the curtain only falls when the last one ends.

Licence

MIT.