omachy-dmenu

A real dmenu clone for Omarchy 4 (Quattro), integrated directly into the status bar itself — not a dropdown, not a card, not a second bar. When summoned it paints a bar-colored segment directly in the real bar, starting right after your workspace numbers and never reaching past the screen's horizontal center, with matches laid out left-to-right after the input exactly like vanilla dmenu/dmenu_run. Matching semantics and the freeform "run whatever I typed" fallback are also taken from actual dmenu (see Behavior notes below).

Plugin id: local.dmenu · kind: overlay · repo: coquer/omachy-dmenu · license: MIT

Requirements

• Omarchy 4 (Quattro) — this plugin runs inside omarchy-shell (Quickshell) and depends on shared shell singletons (qs.Commons: Color, Style, Util, Border) and the shell's AppLibrary service that only exist there. It will not work as a standalone quickshell -p script beyond basic app filtering.
• Hyprland, as shipped with Omarchy (for the SUPER + D keybind and layer-shell overlay support).
• No other dependencies — pure QML, no external scripts. Application launches shell out to uwsm-app/gtk-launch, which ship with Omarchy.

Install

Recommended — one command, using Omarchy's own plugin installer:

omarchy plugin add git@github.com:coquer/omachy-dmenu.git --enable

This clones the repo straight into ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/local.dmenu, validates the manifest, and enables it. Skip --enable if you'd rather review the code first and enable it yourself later with omarchy plugin enable local.dmenu.

Manual alternative — if you want to inspect or edit the code before installing:

git clone git@github.com:coquer/omachy-dmenu.git
omarchy plugin validate omachy-dmenu
cp -r omachy-dmenu ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/local.dmenu
omarchy-shell shell rescanPlugins
omarchy plugin enable local.dmenu

Verify it works

omarchy-shell shell toggle local.dmenu

You should see a bar-colored segment appear in the status bar, starting right after your workspace numbers, with a cursor and your application list running left-to-right after it, stopping before the screen's horizontal center — the rest of the real bar (clock, tray, etc.) stays visible and untouched. Run the same command again to close it.

Key binding (manual step — can't be automated)

There's no Omarchy CLI command that adds an arbitrary Hyprland keybind for you, and an installer script safely rewriting your personal ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua unattended is exactly the kind of thing that can silently clobber bindings you already rely on — so this part is on you, once, by hand.

1. Check whether SUPER + D is already bound to something:

   omarchy menu keybindings --print | grep "SUPER + D"
   

2. Open ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua. If SUPER + D showed up above, unbind it first, then bind the launcher:

   hl.unbind("SUPER + D")
   o.bind("SUPER + D", "App launcher", "omarchy-shell shell toggle local.dmenu")
   

   If nothing was bound, skip the hl.unbind line.
3. Save. Hyprland auto-reloads, but validate it:

   hyprctl reload
   hyprctl configerrors
   

Pick a different key the same way if you'd rather not touch SUPER + D.

Optional: a bar trigger instead of/alongside the keybind

This plugin only declares the overlay kind, so it isn't summonable from the bar layout directly. If you want a clickable trigger too, the simplest route is a bar exec widget (or any launcher button) running the same IPC command: omarchy-shell shell toggle local.dmenu.

Updating

If you installed via omarchy plugin add (git-managed):

omarchy plugin update local.dmenu
omarchy restart shell   # see "Editing/updating" below — required every time

If you installed manually, git pull in your clone and re-copy the changed files, then restart the shell the same way.

Editing/updating this plugin (important)

The manifest sets keepLoaded: true, so once mounted the plugin's window stays alive for the rest of the shell session. Both the file-watcher's automatic reload and omarchy-shell shell rescanPlugins only refresh the plugin registry/manifest — neither one tears down and rebuilds an already-mounted keepLoaded component. In practice this means: after the first load, any change to Dmenu.qml — whether from plugin update, git pull, or a local edit — will save/validate fine but won't actually show up until you force a real restart:

omarchy restart shell

Do that after every update or edit rather than trusting the hot-reload — otherwise you'll be looking at stale behavior and not know it.

Customizing

Everything worth tweaking is a property near the top of Dmenu.qml — remember to omarchy restart shell after editing (see above):

Positioning

leftOffset tracks your current workspace count live, rather than being one fixed guess: leftOffset = leftBase + workspaceCount * perWorkspaceWidth. A separate Wayland layer-shell surface still can't query the real bar's live rendered widget width directly, but the workspace widget (i3-workspaces/omarchy.workspaces) renders each active workspace as a fixed-width pill with no gap between them (Style.space(20), no columnSpacing), so the variable part can be computed from the same live Hyprland workspace data those widgets read (Quickshell.Hyprland's Hyprland.workspaces, filtered to the current monitor and refreshed on every open) instead of measured once and left stale. This is what fixed the "gap is too wide with only a few workspaces active" issue — the offset now shrinks and grows with the actual pill count instead of assuming a fixed number of them.

leftBase (default 40) is the part that doesn't vary with workspace count — bar edge margin, menu icon, module spacing — and is still a measured constant, the same way leftOffset used to be entirely. If your left section has different widgets before the workspace pills (or you don't use i3-workspaces-style fixed-width pills at all), re-measure just that base:

# crop a strip from the top-left corner and narrow the width until the
# first workspace number just disappears — that width is your leftBase
grim -g "0,0 60x30" /tmp/bar-check.png

The right edge is capped at the screen's horizontal center minus centerGap (default 100px), via the read-only maxRightX/ contentWidth properties — so the segment can never grow past that regardless of how many matches there are, and there's always some breathing room before the bar's center modules (clock, etc.). Increase centerGap for more room, decrease it (down to 0) to let the segment reach all the way to center.

Behavior notes

This launcher matches real dmenu's own semantics and shape, not a fuzzy-search app-picker's — modeled on i3-dmenu-desktop feeding names to the actual dmenu binary:

• Layout: a single flat segment integrated into the real status bar — not a floating card, not a second bar — prompt/input on the left, matches immediately after it running left-to-right, not a dropdown list. It starts right after your workspace numbers — tracking however many are actually active right now, not a fixed guess — and stops before the screen's horizontal center (see Positioning above); the rest of the real bar stays visible on both sides.
• Matching: case-insensitive, and every space-separated term in your query must appear somewhere in the name (an AND search, e.g. "fire fox" matches "Firefox"). There is no fuzzy or acronym scoring. Results are bucketed exact match, then prefix match, then any other substring match — each bucket keeps the underlying dictionary order, same as dmenu's own match().
• Freeform exec (dmenu_run parity): if nothing matches your typed text and you press Enter, it runs the raw text as a shell command instead of doing nothing — the defining dmenu feature that makes it a command launcher, not just an app picker. If there is a match, Enter always launches the highlighted app instead, even if what you typed isn't the full name.
• The app list itself (names + hidden-entry filtering) comes from the shell's shared AppLibrary (same source the Omarchy menu's Apps submenu uses) when running inside omarchy-shell — only the ranking is reimplemented here to match dmenu instead of AppLibrary's fuzzy scorer. Falls back to DesktopEntries directly if AppLibrary isn't injected (e.g. loaded standalone with quickshell -p).
• Navigation: Left/Right (matches run horizontally, not vertically), Tab/Shift+Tab, and Ctrl+J/Ctrl+K (plain j/k are left alone since you're always typing a filter, like real dmenu).
• Escape, Ctrl+C, or clicking anywhere outside the visible segment all close without launching — a deliberate departure from real dmenu, which has no click-outside at all (its X11 grab makes the rest of the desktop unreachable while it's open, so the concept doesn't apply there). Here the surface spans the full bar width to hold the keyboard grab, so any click that lands outside the visible segment closes it instead of doing nothing.
• App launches use the same path as the Omarchy menu: uwsm-app -- gtk-launch <id>.desktop. Freeform commands run directly via bash -lc.
• keepLoaded: true in the manifest keeps the window mounted between summons so repeat opens are instant (see the restart caveat above).

Uninstalling

omarchy plugin remove local.dmenu

This disables the plugin and removes it from ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/. What exactly happens to the files depends on how you installed it:

• Installed via omarchy plugin add (a git checkout): the folder is deleted outright — no local backup — since the code still exists in this upstream repo and can be re-added any time.
• Installed manually (plain copy, no .git): the folder is moved to a timestamped backup alongside it (e.g. .local.dmenu.bak.<timestamp>) rather than deleted, so nothing is lost if you copied over local edits.

No shell restart is needed afterward — unlike editing the plugin in place, plugin remove disables it through the shell's own IPC before touching the folder, so the keepLoaded window is properly torn down.

Finally, undo the keybind: remove (or repurpose) the o.bind("SUPER + D", ...) line you added to ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua, and its hl.unbind("SUPER + D") above it if you added one, then hyprctl reload.