omarchy/agents/skills/shell-dev.md

Omarchy Shell Development

Read this before editing the Quickshell desktop under shell/.

The Quickshell desktop runs as a single long-running process out of shell/. Hyprland autostart launches it directly with quickshell -n -p; do not start additional standalone Quickshell instances for individual components.

Run omarchy-restart-shell after making changes to QML files.

Plugin contract

• First-party plugins live directly under shell/plugins/ or one category level deeper, such as shell/plugins/panels/weather/. First-party bar-only widgets may use adjacent *.manifest.json files. Third-party plugins live at ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/<id>/ with a manifest.json at the root.
• Every plugin manifest declares schemaVersion, id, name, version, kinds, and entryPoints. See docs/omarchy-shell.md and shell/services/PluginRegistry.qml for the current contract; fields such as activation are optional.
• Entry-point QML files are Items (not ShellRoot), and accept the shell-injected properties omarchyPath, shell, manifest, and pluginRegistry / barWidgetRegistry as appropriate. First-party plugins receive the host objects. Third-party plugins receive capability-scoped facades: ordinary plugins may look up and control only their own service and lifecycle, built-in clones retain narrow source-specific configuration and UI compatibility, menu plugins receive an application-library facade, and plugins can read detached scalar bar state; full-bar plugins additionally receive detached bar configuration and widget-catalog snapshots, narrow proxies for the non-authentication services used by built-in bar widgets, and lifecycle control over configured non-authentication UI plugins. Authentication capabilities must be stamped from trusted first-party manifests, and third-party registry views and bar configuration must be detached snapshots rather than shared objects. These facades reduce accidental authority but are not a same-process QML sandbox: a visual bar widget can walk its parent hierarchy to ordinary host objects. Authentication services must therefore remain outside both ShellRoot._services and the host QObject tree. Do not expose authentication services through new third-party-facing properties.
• Panel / overlay / menu plugins must expose open(payloadJson) and close() lifecycle methods for shell summon and shell hide.

IPC

• bin/omarchy-shell is the canonical IPC entry point. It forwards to the running shell and does not start it. Prefer it over re-implementing direct Quickshell socket calls in every CLI.
• The shell IPC target exposes lifecycle and configuration methods including ping, summon, hide, toggle, call, rescanPlugins, reloadConfig, setPluginEnabled, and listPlugins. shell.qml also registers image-selector, which drives the omarchy.image-picker panel.
• Individual plugins register their own IPC targets, named for the plugin rather than for where they appear: the background switcher registers background, and bar widgets register one target each — omarchy.indicators, omarchy.system-update, omarchy.clock. There is no bar target.

Editing widget files with glyphs

Widget files in shell/plugins/bar/widgets/ contain Nerd Font glyphs as raw unicode characters. Agent file-editing tools can strip multi-byte codepoints in some positions — do not rewrite widget files wholesale through those tools. For glyph fixes, make a targeted edit with the surrounding context, or use a Python script that inserts codepoints via chr(0xXXXXX).