Swiss Transport
Live Swiss public transport on a map in the Omarchy bar: trains, metros, trams, buses, boats and mountain lifts moving around you, from the federal Open Journey Planner — in English, French or German.
Left alone it is a single locomotive in the bar with a small Swiss cross on it, and it makes no requests at all. Click it and it becomes a live map of the square kilometre around you.
Highlights
- Vehicles moving on a map, each carrying the glyph of what it is — train, metro, tram, bus, boat, cable car, funicular — with a pip showing which way it is going. Positions are recomputed five times a second at no network cost.
- Where they come from is stated plainly. Switzerland publishes no vehicle-position feed, so a position is derived by interpolating between two timetabled calls and their real-time estimates. Every speed on screen is labelled derived, and each vehicle says whether it is running on real-time data or on the timetable alone.
- Click a vehicle for its number, type, derived speed, status and the stops immediately behind and ahead — Not applicable where there genuinely is no previous or next stop — with its route drawn on the map.
- Click a stop for its departure board and, above it, every line that calls there at all: the interchange, which is what a dot on a map cannot show. Click a boxed line number and that whole line is drawn across the map.
- Drag to pan, wheel to zoom, 200 m to 20 km, remembered. The wheel zooms about the pointer, so what you lean towards stays under it.
- Favourites with their full name and canton — Le Grand-St-Bernard (VS), Hospice — starred on the map and listed with their distance from where you are looking.
- The swisstopo national map underneath, grey or colour. Cached, with the zoom level either side fetched in advance so zooming does not pause.
- Two mountain presets. I'm hiking! and I'm skiing! narrow the transport to what gets you to and from the mountain — and narrow the stops polled, so a map of lifts is not mostly buses — then answer what is on the ground where you click: the altitude anywhere in the country, the signposted hiking routes with their numbers and stages, or the ski-touring routes with the club's grade, the ascent, the climbing time and the hut they lead to.
- An empty map says which kind of empty it is. Outside the cities the usual case is a timetable with nothing on it, so the panel names the next departure instead of leaving you wondering whether it is broken. A lift shut for the season reads as shut, not as an error.
- English, French or German, switchable in the panel and sent to the planner, so stop names and product categories come back in it too.
Install
omarchy plugin add https://github.com/jmaeder/omarchy-swisstransport.git --enable
--enable asks where to put it in the bar. To place it yourself:
omarchy plugin enable jmaeder.swisstransport center --before omarchy.clock
Needs Omarchy 4 (Quattro) with shell plugin support, curl, and a Nerd Font
for the vehicle glyphs — a stock install has all three.
Your own API key
The plugin needs an Open Journey Planner key, which the federal platform issues free of charge to anyone who asks. Register at api-manager.opentransportdata.swiss, subscribe to the OJP 2.0 API, and copy the token: about two minutes, no cost, no approval step.
A plugin cannot ship a shared key. It would be a public secret in a public repository, and the first misuse would get it revoked for everyone at once.
Open the panel and paste the key. It is stored at
~/.local/state/omarchy/plugins/jmaeder.swisstransport/curlrc, created with
mode 0600 inside a 0700 directory, in a form curl reads directly. The
panel never loads it back: what it checks is whether the file exists, not what
is in it. Forget key in the footer deletes it.
Controls
| Action | Result |
|---|---|
| Click the bar item | Open / close the panel |
| Drag the map | Pan |
| Wheel, or + / − | Zoom about the pointer |
| Click a vehicle | Follow it, and draw its route |
| Click a stop | Its departure board and interchange |
| Click a boxed line number | Draw that whole line across the map |
| Click empty map | Clear the selection — in a mountain preset, ask what is on the ground there |
| ↻ on the location chip | Look up where you are again |
| ★ in the header | The full favourites list |
Esc |
Back to the map, then close |
Settings
Set these on the widget's entry in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json.
| Key | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
language |
(locale) | en, fr or de; the panel's own selector overrides it |
swissCross |
true |
Badge the bar locomotive with a small Swiss cross |
sideMetres |
1000 |
Side of the square of ground the map covers. Clamped to 200–20000; the panel's own zoom writes here |
renderSeconds |
0.2 |
How often positions are re-interpolated. This is the whole of the animation. Costs no request; clamped to 0.1–10 |
networkSeconds |
20 |
How often the planner is polled. Clamped to 10–300, and further limited by the quota guard |
maxStops |
6 |
How many nearby stops are queried per cycle. More stops, more vehicles, more requests. Clamped to 1–12 |
detectLocation |
true |
Detect your region once, on first run |
basemap |
true |
Kill switch, not a mode: false stops every swisstopo request, tiles and cantons both |
basemapLayer |
grey |
grey or colour; the panel's own tick overrides it |
basemapOpacity |
(per layer) | How strongly the map shows through, 0.05–0.8. Left unset, each sheet uses the strength that suits it |
Data and privacy
Everything on screen is federal open data. Transport comes from
api.opentransportdata.swiss (Open Journey Planner 2.0), under your own key.
The national map, the ski-touring and footpath sheets, the altitude and the
canton of a place come from swisstopo, at wmts.geo.admin.ch and
api3.geo.admin.ch — the journey planner publishes none of those. Location
detection is one request to ipapi.co, at most once, and only if you leave
detectLocation on. Those four hosts are the only ones the plugin ever
contacts; the list is enforced in code, the host is re-derived from the
finished URL before every request, and redirects are not followed.
Your search terms travel in the request body, never in a URL. The plugin
writes your key, a small state file and a tile cache, all under
~/.local/state/ and ~/.cache/, and nothing else.
Requests are held under the published quota by a token bucket checked before every call rather than by trusting the timer intervals. swisstopo asks only that it be credited, which the map does in its corner.
Documentation
- The panel in detail — every feature, getting a key, where the map starts, the mountain presets, zooming, and the settings in full
- Where the data comes from — how a vehicle position is derived, why swisstopo is needed, the cache, the quota
- Privacy and security — what it fetches, writes and refuses
- What the mountain modes can show — the coverage audit behind the two presets, measured canton by canton
- Development — layout, tests, and the traps that cost an afternoon each
Licence
MIT — see LICENSE.
Transport data from opentransportdata.swiss (Open Journey Planner 2.0). National map, ski-touring and footpath sheets and cantonal boundaries © swisstopo. Coarse first-run geolocation by ipapi.co. The data this plugin displays is governed by the terms of those services.