Discord for the Omarchy bar

A bar widget for the Discord desktop app, built the way the first-party Dropbox and Tailscale plugins are built: vector icon, keyboard-navigable panel, and no configuration.

The mark is drawn as vector geometry, so it takes the theme's foreground at any size and sits at the same ink weight as its neighbours:

While you are in a call the icon grows a dot, and that dot turns the theme's urgent color whenever the call cannot hear you, which is the state above.

What it tells you

Nothing polls Discord's servers, and no account, token, or developer application is involved.

Requirements

• Omarchy Quattro. This is built against its shell plugin contract.
• Discord from the Arch discord package, or vesktop. Every signal keys off the client's shape: window class discord, desktop entry discord.desktop and a process called Discord, or the same three slots reading vesktop. A Flatpak build, another fork, or Discord run as a web app publishes different values and is not supported. Making those work is a real change with a real test rather than a configuration knob, so the plugin does not pretend otherwise.
• python3, and only for the optional voice bridge at the bottom of this page. Omarchy already ships it.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/thisisgm/omarchy-discord.git --enable

Or, from a local checkout:

cp -r omarchy-discord ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/io.github.thisisgm.discord
omarchy-shell shell rescanPlugins
omarchy plugin enable io.github.thisisgm.discord

Replace Discord's own tray icon

Discord registers a tray item of its own, so out of the box you get two Discord icons in the bar. Omarchy already solves this for its bundled plugins, since the tray hides Dropbox's item when the Dropbox widget is loaded, but that list lives in the shell and takes no plugin hook. So hide Discord's item once by hand:

right-click the tray > Manage > untick Discord.

That writes discord_status_icon_1 into the tray's hidden list in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json, and it stays hidden across restarts. Untick it again if you ever remove this widget.

Using it

The bar icon dims when Discord is not running, turns the theme's urgent color when Discord wants your attention, and grows a dot while you are in a voice call. The dot is urgent-colored whenever the call cannot hear you.

Keybindings

The panel is not the only way in. Bind these anywhere:

omarchy-shell discord raise    # focus the window, or start Discord
omarchy-shell discord mute     # toggle the call microphone
omarchy-shell discord deafen   # toggle deafen (needs the bridge, below)
omarchy-shell discord hangup   # leave the call (needs the bridge, below)
omarchy-shell discord toggle   # the panel

mute is the interesting one: it works from any workspace without focusing Discord. Without the optional bridge it mutes Discord's microphone at the PipeWire level; with it, it presses Discord's own mute button.

Each verb answers ok, or says why it did nothing: no voice bridge, no microphone to mute, Discord is not installed.

Settings

One, in Setup > Plugins: hide the icon when Discord is not running.

Limits worth knowing

• Attention needs a window. Hyprland can only flag a window that exists, so an instance closed to the tray reports nothing. The widget shows "Running in the background" and can raise it.
• Mic control needs an open capture stream. Discord releases the stream when it closes the microphone, and there is nothing to mute at the PipeWire level until it comes back. The row appears when the stream does.
• Vesktop's call dot rides its capture stream. Vesktop publishes no voice-engine name for its streams, so the capture stream is the call signal. Unlike Discord it keeps that stream under its own mute, so the dot survives muting.
• Muting here is not Discord's mute button. Discord's own UI will still show you as unmuted while PipeWire feeds it silence.

Both limits go away with the optional bridge below, which drives Discord's own mute instead.

Optional: Discord's own voice controls

Everything above needs no account, token, or setup. Four things cannot be had that way, because nothing outside Discord knows them: which channel you are in, Discord's own mute and deafen, and hanging up.

Those come from Discord's local RPC socket, and Discord gates it. The socket refuses any client id that is not a registered application:

{"code":4000,"message":"Invalid Client ID"}

Client ids are public, so the plugin could ship one, but the rpc scope it needs is approval-gated, and until an app is approved only accounts on its App Testers list may authorize. A shipped client id would therefore work for the author and for nobody else. There is no anonymous route.

So the bridge is opt-in, and the plugin is complete without it. With no credentials rpc.py exits immediately, the panel still knows you are in a call because PipeWire says so, and the voice section quietly offers to set itself up:

To turn it on, open the panel and use Set up voice controls, which takes the two values inline, no terminal. The same thing from a shell, if you prefer:

python3 ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/io.github.thisisgm.discord/rpc.py --setup

That opens the developer portal, prints the two things to create there, and takes the Client ID and Client Secret, both on the application's OAuth2 page with the secret behind Reset Secret. It then authorizes against your running Discord, so you find out it worked before you leave the terminal. It stores the pair in ~/.config/omarchy-discord/credentials.json and the token in ~/.local/state/omarchy-discord/token.json, both 0600. The panel writes those values over stdin, so a secret never appears in a command line or in ps.

The Public Key on General Information is a different value: it verifies interaction webhook signatures and cannot buy a token. It is 64 hex characters, and --setup rejects it by name if you paste it.

Open the panel afterwards, no restart needed, and it gains the call's name, deafen, mic gain, and a leave-call row, and the mic row starts driving Discord's own mute. --probe re-checks it any time.

If you are not the application's owner, your account has to be on its App Testers list; the owner is already covered.

Uninstall

omarchy plugin remove io.github.thisisgm.discord
rm -rf ~/.config/omarchy-discord ~/.local/state/omarchy-discord

Those two directories are the client secret and the token from voice controls, so they go with the plugin rather than outliving it. Nothing else is left behind except the tray entry you unticked, if you got that far.

Contributing

Patches and bug reports are welcome. CONTRIBUTING.md has the two-copy layout, how to test a change against a running shell, and the house rules the code is held to.

The platform facts this depends on, such as how PipeWire names Discord's streams and what the RPC handshake refuses, live in knowledge/ as an Open Knowledge Format bundle. Every one of them was measured on a running machine, so the next person does not have to rediscover them.

Support

If this saved you an afternoon, you can buy me a coffee.

License

MIT.