Omarchy Plugin Ideas — desktop alerts

Never miss a plugin idea worth building.

An Omarchy shell plugin that desktop-notifies you when someone posts a new idea to this repo's Ideas discussions, plus a bar icon (💡) — badged when there's something unseen — with a panel for browsing open ideas and acting on them — Upvote, Comment, Build it.

Looking to post or browse plugin ideas instead of installing anything? Go straight to the ideas board or the Discussions tab — no install required.

How it works

Notifications (Service.qml). Every intervalSeconds (default 300), the plugin POSTs an anonymous GraphQL query to api.github.com/graphql for the configured repo — no token or gh auth login needed, since GitHub serves public data to unauthenticated requests too (just under a small shared-per-IP rate limit; 5-minute polling stays well under it, but a heavily shared IP, e.g. some ISPs/CGNAT, can hit it from unrelated traffic). If that happens, it falls back once to gh api graphql when the GitHub CLI is installed and logged in.

It fetches the repo's 15 most recent discussions and compares the highest discussion number it's seen before against the ones in the configured category. Anything newer fires a desktop notification via omarchy-notification-send; clicking the notification opens the discussion in your browser.

The first poll after install only records the current state — it will not replay the repo's entire idea history as a wall of notifications.

Every successful poll also writes the highest known idea number in the configured category to ~/.local/state/omarchy/settings/idea-alerts-latest.json — this is what badges the bar icon (see below). It's a one-way, single-writer file: only the service writes it, only the bar icon reads it.

Bar badge. The 💡 icon shows a small dot when there are ideas newer than the last time you opened the panel — the bar's icon slot is only 21px, too small for a legible number, so the exact count is in the tooltip instead (hover the icon). Opening the panel, by any means — clicking the icon, an IPC open/toggle call, or shell.summon — marks everything caught up and clears it. The badge tracks the notifier's view of the category, so it can lag up to one intervalSeconds behind a truly brand-new post.

Browse panel (BarWidget.qml + Panel.qml). Click the 💡 in the bar to fetch and list the repo's open ideas (same anonymous-then-gh fetch as above, on demand — it doesn't share state with the notifier beyond reading the badge file above). Ideas already labeled built are left out of the list — showing something that already shipped just invites a duplicate claim on it. Anything else carrying a claimed or in-progress label (see status labels) gets a small badge next to its title, so it's obvious at a glance that it's already spoken for.

Each idea gets three actions:

• 👍 Upvote — adds a GitHub reaction via gh api graphql. Needs gh auth login (write access); falls back to opening the discussion in your browser if gh isn't available or useGhForActions is turned off.
• 💬 Comment — opens the discussion straight at the comment box (#new_comment_field). No auth needed.
• 🛠️ Build it — posts the standard claim comment ("I'd like to build this!...") via gh api graphql. Same auth requirement and useGhForActions behavior as Upvote; otherwise falls back to the comment-box deep link. Posting this doesn't apply the claimed label itself — that's still a maintainer step (see CONTRIBUTING.md) — so a freshly-claimed idea won't show the badge until that happens.

Requirements

• curl and xdg-open (both present on Omarchy by default)
• The target repo and its Discussions must be public
• No account, token, or gh auth login required for notifications or browsing
• gh auth login only if you want Upvote/Build it to actually post to GitHub instead of falling back to your browser

If the configured repo can't be reached, you'll get one notification saying so instead of silent failure — then it stays quiet until the next successful poll.

Security notes

Omarchy plugins run unsandboxed inside the shell process — review the source before installing anything, this one included. Specifically:

• The click-to-open action on notifications (--exec "xdg-open <url>") is only ever set after the URL is checked against a regex matching the exact discussion URL GitHub would generate for the configured owner/repo (IdeaAlertsModel.isSafeDiscussionUrl). A malformed or unexpected API response can't smuggle an arbitrary shell command in.
• The panel never writes to GitHub silently. Upvote and Build it only run gh api graphql — using your own locally-authenticated gh session — when you click them; nothing runs on a timer or on open.
• The background notifier only ever reads (GraphQL queries), never writes.

Known limitations

• The service (notifications) and bar-widget (panel) can't be independently enabled/disabled through the omarchy plugin CLI today — disabling the plugin turns off both. Removing just the bar icon means editing ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json by hand.
• The bar badge only counts the configured category and only updates on the service's own poll cycle — it's a "roughly how many," not a live counter.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/ranjithrajv/omarchy-plugin-ideas.git --enable

Or, once listed, install straight from the Omarchy Plugin Marketplace. Run omarchy plugin update io.github.ranjithraj.idea-alerts to pick up upstream changes later.

If the 💡 icon doesn't show up in the bar after enabling: on some setups omarchy plugin enable --section and omarchy bar put both report success without actually writing the placement (a shell bug, not this plugin — worth reporting upstream if you hit it). Work around it by adding the widget to ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json yourself, under bar.layout.<section>:

{ "id": "io.github.ranjithraj.idea-alerts" }

then omarchy restart shell. The service (notifications) works regardless — only the bar icon needs this.

Editing Service.qml or IdeaAlertsModel.js after install requires omarchy restart shell to take effect — service-kind plugins mount once at shell startup and don't hot-reload their code the way bar widgets and panels do.

To remove: omarchy plugin disable io.github.ranjithraj.idea-alerts, then delete the folder.

Configuration

Optional. Create ~/.local/state/omarchy/settings/idea-alerts.json to point it at a different repo or category:

{
  "owner": "ranjithrajv",
  "repo": "omarchy-plugin-ideas",
  "category": "ideas",
  "intervalSeconds": 300,
  "useGhForActions": true
}

All fields are optional and fall back to the defaults shown above. Set useGhForActions to false to make Upvote and Build it always open your browser instead of attempting a real write via gh api graphql, even if gh is installed and authenticated. The file is watched, so edits apply without restarting the shell.

Manual check

omarchy-shell idea-alerts check   # poll immediately
omarchy-shell idea-alerts status  # current config + last-seen discussion number
omarchy-shell idea-alerts reset   # forget last-seen state and re-baseline (use after repointing owner/repo)

License

Public domain — see LICENSE. No external dependencies beyond the curl and xdg-open binaries already present on Omarchy.