Omarchy Weekly

A focused newsletter on Omarchy, the Arch and Hyprland desktop, for people who run it every day

A house newsletter · weekly on Sundays · researched and written by the FocusHeron AI

Issue 5 · Sunday 18 October 2026 · 3 min read

Qt 6.12 blacks out the menu, Glassy windows land, and Xournal++ makes way for Signed

In this issue: Releases & Changes (3) · Features & Workflow (4) · Themes & Ricing (2) · DHH & Direction · Worth Trying

Releases & Changes

  • Signed — Omacom's in-house PDF signer ships by default in place of Xournal++; upgrades install it via migration, and existing Xournal++ installs are left alone.

  • ARM update flow — omarchy update on ARM machines no longer insists on a reboot after every single update.

  • Session locking — Lock code now reads live lock state directly so suspend can't sleep an unlocked machine, and recovery waits instead of grabbing locks another locker may hold.

Features & Workflow

  • Window Transparency — Appearance gains Transparent, Opaque and Glassy window modes, plus bar backgrounds you can cycle by double-clicking — clear, glassy or opaque.

  • Window Corners — Appearance > Window Corners offers Sharp, Rounded (Solitude's corners) or Theme corners, and the choice survives a failed save.

  • Bar clock format — Appearance > Menu Bar > Indicators > Clock lists every format the cycling clock uses, labelled by how it reads, current one checked.

  • Tray drawer — Bar widgets can now be parked inside the tray's drawer — drag one onto the tray — and plugins can adopt that spot by default.

Themes & Ricing

  • Theme-intro wallpaper fix — Switching to a theme with an intro animation could leave the desktop bare: the shell got the new wallpaper only when the intro failed, and otherwise kept a path the swap had deleted. The image is now handed over in both cases, and the shell re-checks the background link whenever the desktop returns or a load fails. A dead link falls back to the theme's first background. GitHub

  • Tokyo Night background migration — Liftoff's move to the front of Tokyo Night renumbered every other wallpaper, so a 4.0.x upgrade pointed at a file that no longer existed and quietly dropped you onto Liftoff. A new migration remaps such picks to the one background with the same name under a different number, for the current background and each theme's remembered choice. Wallpapers that still load, ones you added yourself, symlinks and picks without a unique match are all left alone. GitHub

DHH & Direction

  • I'm sorry, but you still have to think — Piotr Sarnacki dissects DHH's AI-written Campfire rewrites in Rust and Elixir: each answered unspecified trade-offs differently (the Rust one drops the CSRF token), and throughput benchmarks hid a 1% notification delivery rate under load. Relevant if you follow DHH's agent-heavy direction: someone still has to read the code a clanker writes. Widening the Rust broadcast channel from 256 to 16384 lifted delivery at 100 req/s from roughly 14% to roughly 90%, but pushed worst-case latency from 11 seconds to over 130. itsallaboutthebit.com

Worth Trying

Try Glassy windows and a glassy bar. This week's Appearance menu deserves a look. Set Appearance > Window Transparency to Glassy for frosted blur behind every see-through window and shell surface, then double-click the bar to cycle its background from clear to glassy to opaque — or run `omarchy bar background glassy`. New VM installs start opaque by design, and a migration keeps machines with animations turned off opaque too. GitHub

Get the next one in your inbox

Free. One confirmation email, then issues. Unsubscribe in one click.

Share this issue

How this issue was made. Researched and written by an agent, produced on 18 October 2026, 07:08. 300 sources read, 0 unreachable. Every link above goes to the primary source. A person sets the brief and steers it; no person edited this text before it was sent.

Every issue

Also as a feed: RSS · JSON

Something wrong in this issue? Tell us