Switchboard

Every window on every workspace, live, one keystroke away.

Hyprland has no window overview. To reach a window you either remember which workspace it is on, or you cycle blindly until it turns up. Switchboard is a full-screen overview for Omarchy 4 that shows you every window as a live image — not an icon, not a title, the actual window — and gets you into one in a keystroke or two.

Switchboard in use

Full-resolution captioned recording.

Why it feels different

Every other exposé — Mission Control, GNOME Activities, hyprexpo — drops your windows into a grid and makes you aim at one with the mouse. Switchboard is built the other way round: it is a search field that happens to show you live windows.

Two consequences shape everything else:

Filtering dims, it never reflows. Type fir and the non-matches fade and recede where they already are. Nothing moves. Your memory of where things sit on screen survives every keystroke, which is exactly what makes the second keystroke fast. Switchers that re-sort on every character throw that away.

Digits jump, letters filter. No modes, no prefix key, nothing to remember. 1–9 badge the tiles in reading order and teleport you. Everything else goes to the search field.

And the tiles are the real shape of your windows. A tall terminal stays tall, an ultrawide browser stays wide, and each workspace fills its column — so the overview reads as your desktop, not a wall of identical rectangles.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/thebenwalther/omarchy-switchboard.git --enable

Then bind it in ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua:

o.bind("SUPER + SHIFT + code:51", "Switchboard: window overview", "omarchy-shell -q switchboard toggle")

That is SUPER + SHIFT + backslash — the combination your keyboard prints as SUPER + |. Nothing in a stock Omarchy uses it, so nothing needs unbinding.

It is bound by keycode rather than by the bar keysym. code:51 is the backslash key's physical position, which is how Omarchy binds its own punctuation keys, and it avoids depending on how a shifted keysym resolves.

There is a copy in examples/bindings.lua.

Uninstall

Remove the Switchboard line from ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua, then remove the plugin:

omarchy plugin remove io.github.thebenwalther.switchboard

If you created ~/.config/omarchy/switchboard.json, you can remove that file as well.

Keys

Key	What it does
`1`–`9`	Jump to that tile
any letter	Filter by app name or window title
`←` `↑` `↓` `→`, `Tab`, `⇧Tab`	Move the cursor, skipping filtered-out tiles
`⏎`	Jump to the tile under the cursor
`⇧⏎` / `Delete`	Close that window
`⇧1`–`⇧9`	Send the cursor's window to workspace 1–9
`Backspace`	Delete a character; on an empty query, dismiss
`Esc`	Dismiss

With the mouse: hover moves the cursor, click jumps, middle-click closes, and dragging a tile onto another workspace column moves the window there — the view stays where it is, so you can keep rearranging.

Configuration

Switchboard needs no configuration. If you want some, create ~/.config/omarchy/switchboard.json; changes are picked up within a second. Configuration files larger than 12 KiB are ignored.

{
  "maxTileHeight": 0,
  "liveCaptures": 8,
  "showScratchpad": true,
  "heroReturn": true,
  "dimOpacity": 0.25
}

Key	Default	Meaning
`maxTileHeight`	`0`	Ceiling on tile height in pixels. `0` lets a tile grow until it fills its column or the screen, whichever comes first.
`liveCaptures`	`8`	How many tiles stream live at once. Everything else paints one frame and freezes. `0` freezes all of them.
`showScratchpad`	`true`	Include special/scratchpad workspaces, which sort to the end.
`heroReturn`	`true`	Fly the chosen tile to its window on jump.
`dimOpacity`	`0.25`	How far a filtered-out tile recedes.

Switchboard follows your Omarchy theme automatically, including a live omarchy theme set while it is open. Its corner radius tracks Hyprland's decoration:rounding, so it is square when your desktop is square.

Want the desktop behind it blurred? The layer is named omarchy-switchboard:

layerrule = blur, omarchy-switchboard

Scripting

omarchy-shell switchboard toggle     # what the keybinding calls
omarchy-shell switchboard open
omarchy-shell switchboard close
omarchy-shell switchboard status     # JSON: open state, window count, config

Requirements

Omarchy 4 (omarchy-shell, Quickshell 0.3+)
Hyprland with hyprland-toplevel-export-v1 — this is what makes live captures of windows on other workspaces possible, and it has shipped for a long time. Without it Switchboard still works, showing app icons instead of live images.

How it works

Three files do the work. Switchboard.js holds every decision that does not need a compositor — the fuzzy matcher, the column packer, window naming — and is covered by test/switchboard.test.js. Overlay.qml is the surface and the keyboard. Tile.qml is one window. ARCHITECTURE.md has the details worth knowing before changing anything.

node --test 'test/*.test.js'
omarchy plugin validate .

License

MIT — see LICENSE.