Microsoft Dev Blogs

A compact Omarchy bar widget and details panel for recent posts from the Microsoft for Developers RSS feed. The bar shows a developer-machine glyph; the panel lets you browse recent posts, filter them by category, refresh the feed, and open a post in your default browser.

Screenshots

The default widget and panel show the latest posts with title, author, category, and publication time. The image contains only public article metadata and no personal account information.

The Filters control opens a category picker. Selected categories restrict the visible list; choosing All clears the filter. The image shows public feed category names only.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/sinannar/sinannar.omarchy.plugin.msftdevblogs.git --enable

Usage

• Click the bar widget to open or close the details panel.
• Middle-click it to refresh the feed immediately.
• In the panel, select Filters to pin one or more categories. Select All to show every retained post.
• Select Refresh to fetch the feed again, or select a post to open its canonical HTTP(S) link in your default browser.

Configure

Move the widget to a different bar section:

omarchy bar move sinannar.omarchy.plugin.msftdevblogs --section center

Settings are stored in the widget's inline entry in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json. Set values with omarchy bar set; numeric values require --json.

For example, poll every 15 minutes:

omarchy bar set sinannar.omarchy.plugin.msftdevblogs pollIntervalSec 900 --json

IPC

Use the following commands to control the widget from scripts:

omarchy-shell sinannar.omarchy.plugin.msftdevblogs refresh  # fetch now
omarchy-shell sinannar.omarchy.plugin.msftdevblogs open     # open panel
omarchy-shell sinannar.omarchy.plugin.msftdevblogs close    # close panel
omarchy-shell sinannar.omarchy.plugin.msftdevblogs show     # alias for open
omarchy-shell sinannar.omarchy.plugin.msftdevblogs hide     # alias for close
omarchy-shell sinannar.omarchy.plugin.msftdevblogs toggle   # toggle panel

Dependencies

Functional scope

• Fetches only https://devblogs.microsoft.com/landing/; it has no account, sign-in, telemetry, read-state, or article-content storage feature.
• Parses the feed into newest-first post metadata and retains the current successfully parsed snapshot. The panel displays at most 10 matching posts.
• Shows a post title, author, first category, and date; category filters can match any category attached to that post.
• Opens only canonical http or https post links. Links using other schemes are not opened.

Safety and trust boundaries

This is a read-only feed viewer, but its network input is treated as untrusted:

• Retrieval uses curl -fsSL --max-time 10 --max-filesize 1048576 --max-redirs 0, so failed HTTP responses, redirects, and bodies over 1 MiB are errors, and a request has a 10-second limit.
• A bounded streaming collector independently retains at most 1 MiB of stdout or stderr before parsing. At most 200 RSS items are scanned, at most 10 posts are rendered, and no more than 20 persisted category pins are honored.
• Feed-provided text is rendered with Text.PlainText; it is not interpreted as rich text or QML.
• Only HTTP(S) URLs pass the link check before Qt.openUrlExternally is called.
• A malformed, empty, truncated, or failed response keeps the last known-good post snapshot rather than replacing it with an empty panel.

Troubleshooting

• The widget says the feed is unavailable — confirm curl is installed and curl -fsSL --max-time 10 --max-filesize 1048576 --max-redirs 0 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/landing/ succeeds from a terminal. The endpoint must not redirect and its response must be no larger than 1 MiB. Click the widget or use the refresh IPC action to retry.
• No posts appear yet — the initial fetch may still be running, or the most recent fetch failed. Open the panel and select Refresh.
• A category has no visible posts — it may not occur among retained posts, or no retained post matches the pinned categories. Open Filters and select All to clear pins.
• A post does not open — the feed item may not provide a valid HTTP(S) canonical link. Non-HTTP(S) schemes are deliberately blocked.
• Changes to pollIntervalSec seem ignored — use --json for a number; values below 60 seconds intentionally run at the 60-second minimum.

Remove

omarchy plugin remove sinannar.omarchy.plugin.msftdevblogs

Files