SliceTab

Alt-Tab for Omarchy, with a preview of every window and a live view of the selected one.

See it move

A quick tap switches at native speed and never touches the screen:

Hold Alt and the row appears; keep tabbing to browse the live previews:

Escape while holding Alt cancels and returns you to the window you came from:

What it does

Alt-Tab switches windows at native speed and leaves the screen alone. Hold Alt for about 200 ms and a row of your open windows appears. The window you are on sits in the middle at full size and updates live; the others lean in from the sides as thin slices. Release Alt and the row disappears within about 50 ms.

A quick tap therefore draws nothing at all. The same in-compositor timer that watches for the release counts the hold, so the decision is made where the physical key state lives. A lightweight external check covers the short interval while that timer is being armed, carries the same threshold, and remains active if both arm attempts fail.

Every press first runs Omarchy's stock in-compositor cycle_next() and bring_to_top() actions. A third action then notifies the plugin, which only reads compositor state and draws the list. If the shell is restarting, missing, or slow, the native focus change still happens exactly as it does without the plugin.

Only the workspace you are on

The row lists windows from the workspace that currently holds focus, and nothing else. If you are in a scratchpad, you see the scratchpad.

That is a deliberate limit, not a missing feature. A switcher that shows every workspace will, during a screen share, put the contents of your other desktops on someone else's monitor. By the time you notice, they have already seen it. The list is rebuilt from the compositor on every press, and relevant compositor events discard it promptly when windows, workspaces, scratchpads, or monitors change.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/m4rone/omarchy-slicetab.git --enable

Then add the notification actions below to ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua:

o.bind("ALT + TAB", "Show SliceTab", "omarchy-shell -q m4rone.slicetab next")
o.bind("ALT + SHIFT + TAB", "Show SliceTab", "omarchy-shell -q m4rone.slicetab prev")
o.bind("ALT + ESCAPE", "Cancel SliceTab", "omarchy-shell -q m4rone.slicetab cancelKey")

The third line is optional and strongly recommended. Add it and skip the rest of this section; the reason follows for anyone who wants it.

Escape cancels with or without that line. Without it, the plugin has to read the physical key state every 50 ms, because the overlay takes no keyboard focus and therefore receives no key events at all. Two things follow from that, and you notice both.

The keystroke is not consumed, so it reaches the window you had switched to as well. That window acts on it: a dialog closes, a video leaves fullscreen, an editor drops out of insert mode. Focus still returns to where you started, but that other window has already changed state, and cancelling was supposed to change nothing.

And a press shorter than one 50 ms sample can land entirely between two reads. Both samples then see Escape up, nothing cancels, and releasing Alt counts as a choice instead.

The binding removes both. Hyprland consumes the key before any window sees it, and delivers it on the press itself rather than on the next sample. This is a compositor binding loaded from your config, not a keyboard grab by the overlay — that distinction matters, because with the keyboard grabbed Hyprland refuses to move window focus and nothing switches at all.

The cost is one key. Outside a switching sequence Alt+Escape does nothing, so you only give it up in applications that use it themselves. In Omarchy it was unbound; only Super+Escape was taken.

Do not unbind or repeat Omarchy's existing Alt-Tab actions. Omarchy loads its defaults before this user file, so these two lines are appended after the stock actions. That order is required for each key: native cycle_next(), native bring_to_top(), then the shell notification. The notification is deliberately last so the row reads the focus change that Hyprland has already completed.

Updating

A first install needs no restart. After omarchy plugin update, run omarchy restart shell: the shell survives the update, but it can keep the already-loaded old instance answering until it restarts.

A different modifier

Alt is the default. If you bind the switcher to another modifier, tell the plugin. Otherwise the hold watcher polls the wrong key, sees it up on the first tick, and closes the row at once.

1. Bind the keys you want, for example SUPER + TAB and SUPER + ESCAPE.
2. Add modifier to this plugin's entry in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json:

"plugins": [
  { "id": "m4rone.slicetab", "modifier": "SUPER" }
]

Accepted values: ALT, SUPER, CTRL, SHIFT. Any other value falls back to ALT. The key bindings and the modifier value must name the same key. The file hot-reloads on save.

Controls

How it stays out of the way

The overlay never takes keyboard focus. With exclusive focus Hyprland refuses to move window focus, and then nothing switches at all — so the row is presentation only, and Hyprland keeps doing the work.

Because it sees no keys, it cannot receive a normal Alt-release event. Hyprland does offer non-consuming bindings on a bare modifier, and a press on Alt_L does fire one; the matching release never fires, measured on Hyprland 0.56.2 with Scroll_Lock as a working control on both edges. Polling is therefore not a shortcut here, it is the only option.

A single repeating timer inside the compositor checks the physical state of Alt and Escape every 50 ms. It decides three things: when to reveal the row, when to close it, and when Escape has cancelled. While that timer is being armed, and only if arming fails, a short-lived external probe answers the same three questions, so Escape keeps working in that degraded mode too.

Requirements

• Omarchy 4 with omarchy-shell
• Hyprland 0.56 or newer (hl.is_key_down was added after 0.55)
• hyprctl, jq, Bash, and GNU coreutils (timeout) — all four are hard dependencies of the omarchy package, so every Omarchy 4 install has them

The plugin checks the Hyprland requirement once at startup. On an older Hyprland it disables itself and shows one notification; native Alt-Tab keeps working, only the preview row stays away.

Escape cancels while you are still holding Alt and returns you to the window the sequence started from. The overlay never takes keyboard focus, so by itself it cannot consume that keystroke and the application underneath receives it too. Binding Alt+Escape as shown in Install fixes that: Hyprland consumes the key before any window sees it. That is a compositor binding loaded from your config, not a keyboard grab by the overlay, so switching keeps working.

Known limits

• Holding Tab does not repeat. That is Hyprland's key repeat, not this plugin.
• One workspace only, on purpose. See above.
• Without the Alt+Escape binding, a very short Escape tap can be missed. Press and release Escape entirely between two 50 ms polls and both samples see it up, so nothing cancels: the row stays until you release Alt, and that release counts as a choice. Bind Alt+Escape and this cannot happen — the key arrives as an event instead of as a sample.

Considered, deliberately not solved

• Workspace changes are event-driven. The list is discarded as soon as the shell receives Hyprland's workspace, scratchpad, window-move, or monitor event. Those events cross an IPC socket, so this is strong leak prevention, not a compositor-level zero-frame security boundary.

Remove

omarchy plugin remove m4rone.slicetab

Then delete the three m4rone.slicetab bindings from ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua. The plugin writes no other configuration.

Licence

MIT. Carousel visuals derived from Omarchy's image picker (MIT, © David Heinemeier Hansson).