Omarchy: The Only Way to Use a Computer If You’ve Transcended Basic Human Needs
... Omarchy is not for the faint of heart. It’s for the truly enlightened: the kind of person who sets up keyboard shortcuts for their keyboard shortcuts, then blogs about it from inside Neovim ...
Ah yes, Omarchy. Because simply using a computer like a peasant isn’t enough anymore. Why boot into an OS and… you know, use it, when you could instead spend four weekends compiling fonts, rage-Googling why your clipboard doesn’t work, and feeling superior about it? Welcome to the elite tier of computing, where your window manager is so minimalist it doesn’t even acknowledge windows. Or managers.
Built on top of Arch Linux, because obviously, we’re talking about a system so pure, so untainted, it arrives with literally nothing. Not even shame. And that’s the beauty. If your operating system comes with anything out of the box, it’s clearly bloated. You want sound support? Fonts? A cursor? Do it yourself, normie.
Omarchy is not for the faint of heart. It’s for the truly enlightened: the kind of person who sets up keyboard shortcuts for their keyboard shortcuts, then blogs about it from inside Neovim, themed to match their custom Tokyo Night terminal because otherwise how would anyone know they’re better than you?
Hyperland, the shimmering core of this glorious monastic experience, doesn’t have icons, menus, or distractions like a functional UI. What it does have is hotkeys. Hotkeys for terminals. Hotkeys for browsers. Hotkeys for launching your carefully aliased instance of ChatGPT to explain why your GPU is screaming. Hotkeys to tell your music app to stop playing when you inevitably forget what workspace it lives in. And if you accidentally touch your mouse, don’t worry, it’s not a bug, it’s a test of character.
Themes? Oh yes. You’ve got six of them. All dark, obviously. Light themes are for people who don’t suffer enough. Want to change the look? Don’t click anything, that would be barbaric. No, you’re going to symlink your way to beauty, like a true artisan of the dotfile underground. The themes cascade across applications, terminals, system bars, and your sense of self-worth. It’s the most cohesive aesthetic experience you’ll ever have while questioning your life choices at 2am because your Bluetooth keyboard won’t pair unless Mars is in retrograde.
Installing it? Simple. First, install Arch. If that sentence didn’t send a chill of excitement down your spine, Omarchy isn’t for you. Make sure you enable full disk encryption, because nothing says “I know what I’m doing” like locking yourself out of your machine after a mistyped cryptsetup command. Then install wget, the most luxurious package manager ever invented, and pull down the sacred scripts. You are now officially an Omarchist.
But let’s not forget the true innovation here: virtue-signaling via productivity tools. This is not just a configuration. This is an ideology. Running Dropbox from a tiling window manager is the spiritual equivalent of brewing pour-over coffee in a chem lab while quoting Heidegger. It’s the UX equivalent of CrossFit, pointlessly hard, aggressively evangelized, and undeniably effective if you have the stamina and a strong Wi-Fi signal.
Omarchy isn’t just a desktop. It’s a lifestyle. A beautiful, minimal, handcrafted hellscape of config files and terminal overlays that will absolutely crash when you try to screen share on Zoom. But that’s okay. Because unlike you, Omarchy has principles. And in the end, isn’t that what computing was always meant to be? Painful, elitist, overengineered, but goddamn gorgeous.
Welcome to the church of keybindings. May your .config folder be ever recursive, your Waybar ever themed, and your dopamine ever tied to the arcane joy of pressing Super+Shift+Ctrl+Alt+Space+M to switch from Capuccin to Everforest, because really, what else is there?
Amen.