Steam — Omarchy bar widget

A shortlist of the games you actually play, one click from the bar.

This is not a library browser. Clicking the Steam mark drops the few games you played most recently — cover art, when you last played, how long you have played — and clicking one launches it. There is no search box and no grid, because at five rows there is nothing to search: the game you want is almost always the one you played last.

Everything is read from files Steam already keeps on disk, so the panel opens instantly whether or not Steam is running. No API key, no network call, no account login, and nothing leaves your machine.

Scope, and when to use something else

The whole design is one decision — show a handful of rows and get out of the way. That makes it fast and predictable, and it makes it the wrong tool for some jobs. The Omarchy marketplace has plugins that cover those better:

This one stays deliberately small: Steam only, installed games only, capped at twelve rows, no search, no aggregation. Staying small buys two things — a panel where the game you want is already on screen, with nothing to type and nothing to scroll, and a provider written in bash and awk, so the plugin adds no language runtime to the long-lived shell process it lives inside.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/Unr3leas3d/omarchy-steam-recent --enable right

Or clone it yourself and rescan:

git clone https://github.com/Unr3leas3d/omarchy-steam-recent \
  ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/io.github.unr3leas3d.steam-recent
omarchy-shell shell rescanPlugins
omarchy plugin enable io.github.unr3leas3d.steam-recent right

Drag the icon along the bar to move it; the bar writes the new position back to shell.json itself.

Using it

Settings

Set these on the widget's entry in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json. It hot-reloads on save.

{ "id": "io.github.unr3leas3d.steam-recent", "count": 8, "covers": true }

How it finds your games

scripts/steam-recent does the reading and prints one tab-separated row per game. You can run it directly to see exactly what the panel sees:

~/.config/omarchy/plugins/io.github.unr3leas3d.steam-recent/scripts/steam-recent 5

Only installed games are listed. Proton, the Steam Linux Runtimes, and the redistributables live in steamapps alongside real games and are filtered out by name, because the manifests carry no field that distinguishes them.

Security

Every field the panel shows comes from a file that any local process can rewrite — steamapps/*.acf is not privileged — and the appid ends up concatenated into a shell command when a row is launched. So it is validated as a short run of digits three times over: in the provider, again when the panel parses the provider's output, and once more at the concatenation itself. Anything that is not digits is dropped, never escaped.

Work and memory are bounded at every stage, so neither scales with what is sitting in the Steam tree. Nothing there is privileged, so all of it is treated as attacker-controlled: 8 accounts, 2000 manifests, 20000 playtime records, 25000 rows into aggregation or sort, 1 MiB per manifest, 32 MiB per localconfig.vdf, 4096 bytes per line, 200 characters per game name, and 64 KiB of total output. Overflow past any ceiling is rejected rather than queued. Names are stripped of tabs and control characters before they share a tab-delimited line with an appid.

A tree built to be hostile — 400 accounts holding 800,000 playtime records — runs in 0.5s and 14 MB, against 20.3s and 440 MB before these ceilings.

Requirements

Bash, awk (gawk, the Arch default — the parser uses match() with a capture array), and Steam. No language runtime, no extra packages.

Steam flushes playtime when it exits, so a session's minutes may not appear until you close Steam. Last-played updates as soon as a game exits.

Removing it

omarchy plugin remove io.github.unr3leas3d.steam-recent

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Not affiliated with Valve or Steam.