I Tried Omarchy on a Mac—and Built My Own Plugin

for those that may not know, Ryan and I are actually business partners at Oodle, which is a digital marketing, advertising, and technology company. And Ryan has had a side quest for about the last year, 15 months, something like that or so, where he's been working on Omarchy with DHH and a bunch of other incredibly talented technologists. And while I'm familiar with what Omarchy is, how it works, some of the features and things that have been happening along the way, I've actually never used Omarchy. I use macOS and I use Windows. Ryan's been talking up how amazing Omarchy is, and they've gotten all kinds of amazing public press recently. So we thought in today's episode we would put it to the test. How easy is Omarchy to install and learn for a guy coming from Windows and Mac? I'm gonna turn it over to Ryan. He's gonna share some things that have been going on with the Omarchy project, and then we're gonna see how easy this is.

Yeah, we've been doing a ton. We've got a big release coming up, which will bring a ton of new stuff to the table. One of the things the team's been working pretty hard on is support for M-series MacBooks, ARM processors on the Windows or PC side, and a lot more. I can't fit it all Like it it would this would turn into a whole podcast about just like a sales pitch for Omarchy one of the things that that was created probably a couple of weeks ago at this point is the new Try Omarchy experience, which I thought is a pretty cool idea, which is basically we have one on Mac and we have one on Windows where it's it's the second easiest way to try Omarchy. The first easiest way isn't out yet. it'll be really cool. But the second easiest way and current easiest way today is the Try Omarchy experience on the website, which makes it incredibly easy to do exactly what you said. And that's try Omarchy out on your system. Maybe you're not ready to commit. Maybe you're in an environment where you're not able to run a Linux laptop or a Linux computer. You're stuck with a MacBook or a Windows PC. That's fine. You can still run Omarchy and have an incredible experience doing it. So thought it'd be fun to see if Mark could get it up and running. This will be kind of a live demo. We haven't rehearsed any of this. so anything that goes wrong will be reported as bugs.

It's probably an ID 10 T error.

yeah, unless it's an ID 10 T or then we can't fix that. But

Yeah.

all right, let's get going. The

All right.

first thing for you to do, Mark, is share screen so we can see what's going on. But

Share my screen. Okay.

after that is just go to Omarchy dot org and then if you click the button on the the homepage there for get Omarchy, that should pop you down the page. And you're

Try on Mac.

on a Mac, so you'll do try on Mac.

All right. Now this is also

And then hit the

a guy that does not live in terminal, unlike Ryan. So when it sends

Yeah.

me over to a GitHub page, like most people, I'm probably like, do I do I do this? Should I do this? What do I do now?

See this just this just opened up one of the things that we should probably smooth out. So for now, click on release see where it says zero point four point one on the releases in the right hand side.

Zero point four point one. Yeah, here.

Yeah, click on that. And then there's the tryomarchy.dmg download.

no DMGs.

Yeah, there you go. Download that file and then run that. You'll probably have to open it from Finder and then it'll give you a prompt and say, you know, hey, this is something from the internet. Are you sure you wanna open it? It's dangerous. we trust us. So

By the way, this is the only access point in my entire house that's not fully wired now. It's the only one that has one hop. So that's why it's going a little slower.

Doesn't have full speed yet.

Right. All right. It's just open file.

Yeah, you're gonna have to go to Finder to do it. no, you're not

There we go.

actually. there you go. Drag that to applications.

I've never seen it open the window before. Did it do it?

And and then open it however people open stuff on Mac.

I heard it making noise.

There you go. So now you get to go through the litany of permissions things on macOS. So you gotta give it accessibility.

Open settings.

Should just be able click that and it'll take you to where you need to go.

Try Omarchy. Use touch ID. All right. Got one.

Nice thing is that it gives you the nice little feedback there so you know which ones are on, which ones are off, as you're working your way through, because there are a few. Once you get further down there, the like VM location, you can leave that as the default location. Shared folder,

Okay.

you can ignore that. You don't need to share anything. So by default it has, you know, it looks like a what does it say? Eight processor cores,

Eight processor cores.

eight gigs of memory. so you could change that if you wanted to just by clicking on that

What's that look like?

makes it super easy. if it were me, I'd just give it all cores and then from a memory perspective, you've got enough. I'd give it twelve.

All right.

And then save that. Port forwarding. We don't need to port forward any ports. Omarchy Opens Full Screen is on. So that's what we're calling the immersive experience. It's gonna launch in full-screen mode so that it looks and feels like a desktop. So you just hit Launch Omarchy. Yeah.

So what is it doing right now exactly? Is it trying to open the file? Is it unpacking a bunch of stuff, installing stuff?

So right now it's it's basically building and launching the virtual machine.

I see. So the first launch is obviously gonna take longer than future launches.

Yeah, it'll take a little longer for the first one because it's gotta set everything up. And then subsequent ones should be faster. But ultimately it's running as a virtual machine. The nice thing now—with machines being as powerful as they are these days and some of the virtualization layers being as good as they are—“Virtualization started, but Try Omarchy cannot enable Safe Mac Sleep. Please close and reopen.” Yeah, what the fuck does that mean?

Good question. That's why we're doing it. See, we didn't rehearse this.

Cannot enable safe max sleep. Who cares? shit okay. And it did close. Yeah, try it again.

try it again. There's something over here. that's that same thing. All right, let's try it. No rehearsal.

Yeah. Proof. what I was saying before I was rudely interrupted. yeah, it is. Is

Is it still sharing screen? Okay. 'Cause I can't see anything anymore.

With virtualization layers being as thin as they are now, you'll see the performance is pretty good in a virtual machine. So now you can finish your setup here. Just hit Enter or Return. This is the same kind of installer you usually see when you're installing Omarchy on a normal PC.

Mm.

So obviously your English (US) keyboard layout. I I assume you can read from here.

Mm-hmm.

we've tried to keep the the installer pretty thin so that it's you know, it's not a hundred questions long. It's kind of just like what's your username, what's your password, where are you located, so that we can set the time. this is stuff for like your git for git. We'll pre configure your git config for you so that when you commit something.

Is this supposed to be git username or is just my just my full name?

Th this is your full name because this is what shows up like when you make a commit on GitHub

Mm-hmm.

it'll show up as you. So this information automatically goes into your Git config. It's technically optional. You don't have to plug it in if you don't want to. same with the this one, which is your host name. So if you just hit enter, it'll just make it a marchy. And then you'll search for New York is usually what I look for. Yeah, America New York is what you'll be on. And then we give you a nice little confirmation if it looks good. You hit yes.

What is the host name piece for those unfamiliar?

Hostname is Like what your computer is called. In this case, it's a virtual machine on your system, so it kind of doesn't really matter. But if this was a system you were using consistently and you wanted to hook it up to Tailscale and you cared about what it was gonna be called on Tailscale, that's what it'll show up as on the network.

Gotcha.

is that. So goes through, sets up machine. It's super fast because most of this is already done. We're really just In the Try Omarchy version, it's kind of like the preinstalled version where it's already there. We're just finishing out the config, and you're in the system now. The Command key is Super, so hit Super+K. This gives you your this is like your your panic mode. I don't know what to do, because this is your searchable keybinds. everything in in Omarchy is very keybind driven. so you can type, you know, whatever you're searching for here, and it'll filter the list and show you that.

This is Kind of like Omarchy's version of Alfred or whatever you call that on macOS.

Sort of. That'd be more like the we'll show you the other one in a minute. so you've got notifications at the top right. To dismiss those, there is a little X on them, but if you want to do it the right way, you can hit super comma and that'll dismiss the notification. we do have a launcher and you hit superspace to hit the launcher.

Hm, okay.

that is not it. That's the

No, that's macOS.

that's macOS taking over. How do we

Like that.

It works, but it doesn't count. We need to need to deal with that issue.

Yep. Glad I could be a beta tester for you.

So this is the launcher. This is how you get to pretty much anything in Omarchy.

I like a little touch of the of the Apple logo in the background too.

Yeah. So you can you can search for apps, you can you can change things about the system, you can install things. So

not what I wanted to do, but app

Yeah, you know. One of the things One of the things that we'll do right out of the gate—it's actually weird that the Alacritty icon is showing there—go back to the main menu and search for T3.

Like the main main menu.

The one that you're at there, the Omarchy menu.

T3, just type it.

Yep. You can see it filters down to T3 Code. There's a whole AI menu where you can install all sorts of AI things. So you're gonna install T3 Code right now. Just hit Enter on that.

god, it's terminal.

It is a terminal. It's okay.

Ha ha ha. Wait, did that work?

Yeah, too.

Password you fill will not be visible.

because you haven't updated yet. so use the same thing. You can actually instead of having to go through the stupid keybind menu for now, you can click the Omarchy icon at the top left too. And that'll be the same thing.

okay.

so go to update.

You can use the mouse to do all this too, right? But the it's really configured to use arrow keys.

Yeah, you can use either one. and then Omar G. This is something that usually when you first get the system hit yes. You'll we do have a prompt that tells you you'll update Omarchy. There's a technical reason in there too, because when you first install any Arch Linux system, or especially like this one, just hit no on that so that we don't have to deal with the restart.

The reboot? Okay.

Yeah. it doesn't know. It doesn't know what packages are available. So now you can install T3, and it'll work fine. Open the Omarchy menu. You can either go to Install > AI, or just type T3, hit Enter, and type your password. And it still didn't install. What the fuck? Target not found.

No rehearsal. No rehearsal.

I don't know. This is

Real time problem solving.

Strange.

Maybe we need to reboot.

No. hit enter on that and then just hit so to get to a terminal, we're gonna have to go to terminal.

Okay.

you hit super enter.

That's it.

Yep. And type Yay Y A Y space dash capital S and then lowercase Y. And then head enter.

What did we just do? Synchronizing.

Synchronizes the package databases. So now try that same T3 installation. What is going on? Is that I know I you're on Mac and we don't build this for Arch. shit, or

On the T3.

ARM. We don't build this for AArch64. Well, anyway, apparently we need to filter those menus down. So this is an interesting conundrum that gets introduced here, right? The new M-series Macs run on ARM chips, which is AArch64. Most things are compiled,

That's what the release you're working on now is gonna fix, right?

yeah. Most things are compiled for X86.

Mm.

So This is still showing in the menu as installable, but when you try to install it, you can't because we don't build it for AArch64. We need to look at doing that for everything in the menu. But you can just use the terminal for this one. I was trying to give you a nice GUI experience because it'd make you more comfortable.

All right.

go ahead and click done on that one. the one in the middle. Some hit a button there. So a lot of things are pre-installed. The whole point of Omarchy is you don't have to configure the whole system for you. Or you don't have to configure the whole system. We've configured it for you. Some of those are configured in like I'll say intelligent ways, right? one of those is all the AI harnesses. So when you think about something like Claude, normally you'd have to go install Claude. You don't have to install Claude. Now, Claude is not installed right now. so that's one thing that people get paranoid about is they're like, it's bloated, you're installing all this bullshit. It's not installed right now, but it will install itself if you type type Claude. So

So just here.

yep, you just type Claude to launch it, just like normal. And as soon as you hit enter, using Me's, it'll actually go. kind of in the background, reach out, install Claude, and launch it. So it seems as though it was already installed, but it was it actually wasn't. It actually just kind of installed it in the background really quickly and then sent

Hm, that's really cool.

you right in. and we do that to give kind of a like a really seamless experience, make it easy for people to do that. go ahead and log into your Claude account here. Cause what we're gonna do is you're gonna create your first plugin.

All right, so Claude account with subscription. I'm on that.

Yeah, hit Accept. I think the first time you launch the browser it does that on the macOS version.

Or do I hit accept?

Bottom right.

my microphone was yeah my microphone was blocking it. Okay, continue with Google. wow, it's automatically window tiling, that's nice.

Yeah, that's kind of the that's kind of the name of the game, right? Is tiling window management. We

Okay, now I have to go find my password. Use password because now I gotta go over here to Windows or Mac.

Now you could we use 1Password, so Omarchy comes preinstalled with 1Password. So you could just set up 1Password real fast.

All right, let's try it.

so just launch 1Password. Close that.

Okay, so it did it. Now we gotta go find it.

Just yep. So now you'll see it there. And you should be able to hit sign in and then you should just be able to scan that QR code from your phone to sign in.

It sent me somewhere weird. I gotta do it on the 1Password app,

Yeah, you gotta do the 1Password app and then it's like sign in sign in another device, I think is what it's called.

Set up another device.

Yeah.

I don't want to do it like that. Scan QR code.

That's the easiest way I've found to get them set up. Usually when I set up a new system, 1Password is the first thing I install because I have to have it for everything. Then I scan to log in, which is nice. And now you should have access to your passkeys and all that stuff in there. You might have to refresh that browser window.

Passkeys available.

Damn it. You'll have to relaunch Chrome. Or you're missing the Chrome plugin is what it is. You know how Chrome has that 1Password plugin? You could just do

yeah. Right. Initial system setup's annoying, but I get it. It's like that for everything.

Yeah, we've tried to make it as simple as possible. there's some other stuff that we've got some ideas for to kind of smooth out some of this further, especially if you have multiple systems.

Which I do.

yeah, we've usually got a few of them at a time.

I really like the window management though. At least I just get

Towering Mundo Manager slick. The other thing that's cool is that if you hit Super L before closing any of those out, it'll switch to a scrolling layout. and then if you use like super left and right, you can navigate back

nice.

and forth between those windows. And then if you hit super L again, it'll put it back into the dwendle mode. and you can move these windows around. So if you do super shift and then up, down, left, right. That'll actually move the window.

nice.

so you can kind of move windows. You can also do super and drag the window. So, like if you wanted to move 1Password over and you wanted your other window to be fifty fifty somehow, you can kinda

That's way easier than macOS.

Yeah.

I hate macOS's window management. It's awful.

And this is the big part, right? This is the acquired taste of something like Omarchy. It's Hyprland, really. It's not necessarily an Omarchy-specific thing, but it's core to what Omarchy is: tiling window management by default, which is really great once you get used to it, but it's a little

Mm-hmm.

boring at first because You know, if you just keep just hit super enter and just open a couple more windows, you'll see it it keeps dwindling down. forever.

Ha ha ha.

And then you can hit super W is how you close the window. so

Nice. So whatever you're in, it's gonna open. I guess we're just we're opening more terminals by super enter. Yeah.

In this case, yeah, but it's just gonna open it relative to whatever space you're in.

Okay, so if we were over here, it's gonna open what is it, super super enter.

It'll split fifty fifty there. Yep. So it's gonna keep

Nice.

dwindling down whatever space you're in when you hit the when you launch whatever the next thing is. so it's really nice to keep things arranged. You can also like if you say you were four up like this and you kinda need one of these to be a little bit bigger. you can there's a couple different ways you can go full screen. So there's super F, which will go full full screen. so that's like the whole screen. Then you hit super F again to toggle that off. Or you can go super control F, which is like mostly full screen. so it stays within the tiled area.

be super option f. Yeah, super option f on mine.

Super option F. Okay. so that puts it within, you know, kind of this area. Yeah, the full width experience is what we call that one. And then again, super altf we'll toggle that back off or super option. So if you you gotta dismiss those notifications, they're killing me.

Super comma, comma.

Yeah. So one of the big things with Omarchy Quattro is almost everything in the system is built as a plugin. If you look at that whole top bar, everything up there is a plugin. They can be rearranged, so you can drag and drop them if you want to. You can move things from one section to another. That whole piece there is a widget of status indicators, so that's its own plugin. There's plugins over there. There's your network monitor is a plug-in. So all these are all plugins. You can make your own plugins. And the plugins can do all sorts of things. So what I want to do now is toggle over to Fable so hit slash model. Because we want to use the best model. So of course we're not gonna use Opus.

So that's just

And I just hit enter.

opus. Okay, so you get to set it fable.

Yeah. And then just tell it you want to make a plug in for your system and whatever you want the plugin to do.

Hmm, what I wanted to do. That Allows me to see all all active tabs in my browser. I don't know, and be able to toggle between them like a Windows experience with alt tab. We'll see if we can do it.

Yeah.

I know.

But we'll see what happens.

See what happens. We can always do an easier one.

lot of people will start with like a world you know, there's a lot of world clocks out there.

See? Pre rehearsal. We didn't do that. I just threw a really hard one at it.

Yeah, yeah, I know. a lot of reads outside. So yeah, we're just gonna tell it to we're in a virtual machine. So you can t give it give it access to do what it needs to do.

So yes.

This is because it needs to access all plugins get stored in the user config directory. And we just kind of gave it access to the user directory, but it's also trying to access the plugins information, understand how show how plugins work within Omarchy. So you come pre-installed with an Omarchy skill. So Claude already has access and understanding of like how Omarchy works, knows

Mm.

where the documentation is. for Omarchy. So when we're building the system, your agent is able to use the same stuff. And the whole point of that is what David has coined the malleable operating system. The whole

Mm-hmm.

idea is that, you know, we give you a super tailored, refined experience out of the box, but you can make it whatever you want it to be.

That's pretty freaking cool.

And you can do that because we have the power of AI, right? So it used to be that this was, you know, only possible for people who had the knowledge and experience to dig into things. Let's say you've got a mouse that I do. I have I bought the the new Nock to a mouse, the Nock to a Pulsar mouse. and there's no there's no Linux software for Pulsar. So I told Claude, I was like, hey man. We need to make a plugin so that I can manage this mouse. And he was like, Okay, cool. We're gonna use the Windows VM. I'll put a proxy in between and you go click all the stuff and I'll I'll inspect all the USB H ID commands. And it reverse engineered the whole software so that we created like I have a working plugin now. Like that's fantastic. And it took, you know, only a few hours to do that. Would have been would have taken forever. If I'd have had to code that by hand, it would have taken forever to like trial and error, all that shit, sniff out all of the, you know, what packets mean what, what relates to what? I was able to just be like, all right, here's a screenshot of the screen. I'm gonna click everything from left to right, top to bottom, and it used that to sniff it all out. So Claude's got some questions for you. AltTab's currently bound to focus next window, which that's a good point. What do you wanna do? Do you want to Replace it? Do you want to switch it to super alt tab, control alt tab, which also replace something?

Hold Alt, tap Tab to step through tabs, release Alt to switch. Omarchy's window cycling—Alt+Tab and Alt+Shift+Tab—gets unbound. I can move it to another key later. Okay, I gotcha. So it doesn't want to combine them in this case like Windows does. It wants them to stay separate.

Well what it's telling you is that we already have an alt tab. So if you hit alt tab right now, you'll switch to a different window.

Rum thing.

Yeah, the option tab for you. so it's saying that there's already a keybind for alt tab. So if I if we create this plugin and I bind that to alt tab two, now you're performing two actions at once. So either we have to bind it to something different, or we have to override the alt the existing alt tab bind. in which case it would just unbind it.

Places rarely use focus next monitor binding. So I think we do three.

All right, so go down to three and do that. So you'll be control all tab is what you'll be on. Control option tab.

Yeah. This is really freaking cool. The thing that makes me excited about this is I've been averse to using Claude Code, particularly on macOS and Windows, because unless you really know how to use the terminal, it's not as native as Claude Cowork, for example. And so what this does is it

Yeah. Well, that's why I was trying to give you T3. I'll have to figure out if we can build T3 for AArch64. I'm pretty sure I just need to update the package build file to make it work. But the nice thing about that is that it's not a fucking harness, as some people very nicely informed me on the internet when I called it a harness. So what I've been referring to T3 Code as is a harness harness. It's a harness for the harnesses.

Okay.

But it's basically a wrapper. It wraps around Claude Code, Codex, and a couple of others: Claude Code, Codex, Grok, OpenCode. I think they just added one more. Cursor is in there, and I think they just added Antigravity. But it gives you a nice UI to work with. As you know, I'm a terminal diehard. I do everything in the terminal. Somebody got me to try T3—I forget who it was. This is gonna turn into a fucking T3 infomercial.

Yeah.

and I was like, Holy shit, this is actually good. It was Jake. Jake did. He was like, Have you tried it? And I was like, No. But it's the mobile app. I can still access stuff on the go. They also have T3 Connect, so you can connect this system to T3 Connect. I have four other systems. I've got

Yeah.

one system that's just a dedicated mini PC that's just like it's the AI's machine. I've got a a VM that I do a bunch of dev work on. I have my my fractal Terra machine that's that's here. And then I have my laptops. So all of those are connected on T3 Connect, which means when I log in on my whether it's my phone or my laptop or any of those devices, and I crack open T3, every session from every device is on T3. This is our screensaver. You haven't ever seen the screensaver live.

I have not. That's cool.

So there are all different neat little effects with the screensaver. On the Try Omarchy version, it shows the cursor by default, or the icon by default instead of the Omarchy logo. You can customize this. You can set the screensaver. So like if you wanted to have it be instead of being the Omarchy logo, you want the Oodle logo there. You can in the setting or in the Omarchy menu, there's an option for setting your screensaver. You just choose a PNG file or an SVG or something and it'll convert it so that you can use it and it will do the exact same effects with just your logo file. But

that's cool.

anyway, yeah, you have access to all your all of the instances of T3 and all the other devices you have it on from whatever device you're accessing it from, which is pretty fucking cool.

That is really cool. And that that's a missing piece for my AI experiences, to be honest. Like 'cause cowork is only available on the machine that you're working on, which

Right.

is a disaster when you're switching between machines. So

Yep. Well and and for me, like one of the things that's cool is I have a mini PC that it it's hooked up to a KVM, it lives in the closet, and that is the AI's machine. Like so when I'm building plugins and and I've been working on a couple of unique experiences from Archie that I won't share yet. You know, they need the U the part of the loop is I'll have the AI visually inspect its own work. So it needs to be able to control the mouse and keyboard. It's hard to do that when I'm also using the computer because it'll open something up and I'll immediately be like, why is that open? And close it. And then it it gets confused. It thinks that something didn't launch. You know, whatever. So I just give it that computer and but I run it from this one. So I can launch from here and say, like, you know, launch an instance, run it on Foundry Two is the name of that box. tell it where to store everything, and then everything's running on that machine virtually. But I'm controlling

Mm-hmm.

it from here. And if I need to go take my dogs for a walk, I can take them for a walk and then you know flip over to just controlling it from my phone. And I've even taken now to like when it's done, I'll just be like, give me a just give me a video demonstrating how it's working. And it'll fucking record a video of the desktop, do what it needs to do, send me the video in the in the chat, and then I'll just give it feedback on it. And don't even have to, I don't even get hands-on with it until it's pretty much finished. Which is really, really cool.

That's pretty freaking cool. The models have come a long way with that too, of just being able to to do any of that.

Yeah. I will be really surprised if it has figured out a w if it actually has a good way to access all the browser tabs, that'll actually be really, really interesting. 'Cause if you remember when Edge launched as a browser, when they relaunched as a browser as a Chromium browser, holy shit. Those are fake because you didn't have hack

I know.

nodes up. but when when Edge launched as a browser, one of the things that was really cool about Edge on Windows was that alt tab would go between your applications and your browser tabs.

Yep, that's the experience I want.

So if you had, you know, something open that you were in in your browser, and then you flipped to an application, you could just alt tab back to

Yeah.

it. And that was not available on macOS. It was just all or nothing.

Correct. It's still not. Yeah, it's still not, which is why I'm trying to replicate it here.

So that would be interesting because if it if it's able to actually do that, then you could probably replicate that same behavior and tell it, you know, it's obviously because what you asked for is just browser tabs, you'll just have the browser tabs. But then you can be like, all right, now mix in the applications, order them by you know, most recently opened. and it'll probably

Yep. That would be freaking cool.

pull it off. But this starts to show you the power of, you know, you have something that you're like, you know what, I want this thing. And you have the capabilities for two hundred dollars a month to

Ha ha ha.

to make that happen. just by way of prompting it to prompting it to life.

And that that prompt wasn't even a sophisticated prompt at all. Like it was super basic.

Yeah, no, it wasn't that was it it definitely was. And we've seen there's like three thousand plugins that have been over three thousand plugins that have been built at this point and published. probably more that just haven't been published on the marketplace. And it's really cool to see the problems that people are solving. Like some of are really, really neat and like to me are really neat, and I think that a few of will probably even make it into core. As just something that we we ship with Omarchy out of the box. but there's also some that like there are some really bespoke plugins that are like, you know, it's useless to me, but I can see how it's very useful to that person. there are ones that solve specific hardware problems, specific software problems, camera camera things. There's one that somebody made where they can just monitor all of their security cameras just really easily. What else has there been? Somebody re made like a whole Spotify alternative. So rather than having to run Spotify's garbage application, you can run basically all of Spotify as a plug-in in Omarchy and it's way faster and a nicer experience, which is kind of incredible.

Playing I'm playing around while you're talking.

Yeah. There's There's a lot. So if you go to

wait. So we're using e we're using Chrome right now, right? Not Edge?

Yeah, we're using Chromium. the browser I've been using lately is Brave. Brave Origin. Brave is nice. so Brave Origin is like It's basically Brave without any of the bullshit.

Yeah. Well What I'm playing with is the multi-desktop experience. macOS has the ability to do this, but the experience is trash, so I don't use it.

Yeah, 'cause there's a there's a half a second delay when you switch between the desktop. So

Well that and because their window management's terrible, it's just difficult to figure out

Yeah. so if you hit Windows or not Windows, Super One and Super Two, that'll switch back and forth between your like Should be like super super one, two, three, four goes between all your workspaces. I actually just got a message in Riverside that said your browser is not allowing capture, so you might want to check There. so it looks like 1Password maybe launched a window there, which probably would be l blocking. You could try hitting refresh and see what happens. I might see you in a well, I'll see you in a second, I guess. And we're back with two of you.

There's two of me? I only see one of me.

I see two of you.

So let's see, share, share screen, tire screen, do this one again. We back?

She's looking awful frozen.

Yeah, she's definitely frozen. Do I need to relaunch it?

I would try that. Try to kill Try Omarchy and Probably have to do it from the little like launcher bar thingy.

Launch Omarchy.

Yeah, this is why every time you screen share with me I have like a slight panic attack of all of the just windows everywhere and chaos.

Yep, that's a thing.

Like I don't understand how do people live like this?

Okay, so obviously it's not the C. So let's open this, let's find Claude Oops.

So if you do clawed, that's fine. You say yes, trust us. And then inside of the yep, try that. Yep, trust folder. I think you could do slash resume.

Auto mode lets Claude handle permission prompts.

Yeah, that's fine. You want that. It's either slash resume or slash continue. Yeah, slash resume.

Resume previous conversation.

So this will let you resume the one that we were just in.

Omarchy plugin for tab switcher, yep.

There go. And then this is usually when I just say keep going. wait, he says it's built. Using it, hit control alt and tap tab.

Control alt, control alt tab. I don't have any browsers open. So let's go up here. Let's open.

Okay, open some browser tabs. So super shift B opens your default browser.

super shift B. Sweet.

So open a couple of browser tabs and see if this works. It looks you just floated that one. super T floats floats the window. Then if you hit super T again it'll shove it back in.

I was trying to open a new tab.

yeah. Control control T.

Control T. I see. Well let's do speed test just because we can. And then let's go

Fun fact, if you want to do a speed test, click on the network icon.

Network icon.

And we have speed tests built in. Just hit the little speedometer at the top right.

That's pretty freaking fun.

It'll run a nice little speed test for you right in the UI normally. Yep, there you go. Apparently your download is really trash. It's zero.

Maybe it was al already running on that other speed test, so it couldn't do both.

Yeah, that's a possibility.

See, there we go.

It just derped out the first time.

Mm-hmm. So hey, not tr

Just

not trash for one hop connection, huh?

Yeah. They just hit escape. It'll go away.

All right. Let's go here and let's go

Watching out work. I don't know who Marcy is.

So here. Mar see. Marcy. You know Marcy.

So now try control tab.

We all like Marcy. All right, so let's try this now. So we'll come back over here, command or option shift tab. it's freaking working.

Holy shit. That's freaking awesome.

That's freaking let's so let's let's try to combine this now. Okay, now I want this. browser experience to work with

So you want it to also include applications. Yeah.

Yeah, that. locations and order it in the most recently used. Application. See, this is why we need spell check. You don't get that in terminal.

That's all right. He'll He'll he'll figure it out. Yeah, I don't even I just I'll just dictate some shit out of him and it'll mess up dictations and like it's fine, you'll figure it out.

This is freaking cool. I know this is gonna be a super long podcast, but I don't freak I don't care. This is awesome.

So this is the point. This captures live the idea and what makes us different. That's always the question, right? “Omarchy is just Arch. It's just another Arch Linux distro that's a bunch of dotfiles and scripts.” That's very much not true anymore. We've got our own kernel. It's evolved beyond just being some dotfiles.

Mm-hmm.

And truly is its own experience that I think is different than any other distro. and this is one of the pieces that make it that is that not only is this possible, it's also something that we're intentionally trying to enable and intentionally trying to make a better experience. We're trying to make it to where you can open it up out of the box, you have a great experience, you can use it as is, but you can also manipulate it and make it whatever you want it to be. really, really easily, and we've given you the tools, we've exposed the hooks, we've taught the agents how to do that. And sure, you could take Ubuntu and try to do the same thing with it. I don't fucking recommend it because it's gonna be a real

Ha ha.

bad time. for many reasons. But you know, you could we're trying to make this something that like it's it's a good experience. And like A perfect example that I have right now is I absolutely hate Nautilus, the file manager that we have currently. when we

How do I open that?

created Super Shift F, everything's pretty much

Super shift. Yeah.

phonetic, right? So, like to open your file manager, super shift is always gonna launch an application. and it's pretty phonetic from there, where it's like super shift f is file, super shift b is browser.

Got it.

Super shift G is signal. and then your super commands generally control windows or something like that. So like super F is full screen. Super W closes a window. So this is you can see Claude testing it, which is kind

Mm-hmm.

of funny. Like that that's the part where I was saying, like, I give mine a whole system because it'll do stuff like that and then I'll dismiss it and be like, What the hell are you doing?

That's really cool.

but since we launched this plugin thing and we encourage people like, Hey, build your own plugins, there are now three two direct replacements for Nautilus that are really good. Both of them are really, really good. I don't know which one. Like I've I've never had more than one file manager on my system at a time and I have three now. but two of are direct replacement for Nautilus and one of is kind of a completely different take on a file manager. And

How do I install those just for fun?

So if you want to install so you can go to plugins dot omarchi dot org. And this is like the marketplace of of plugins. what's something that would be useful for you? There's all kinds of them. Let see what I've got here.

Yeah, let's plug it.

Where's Omagotchi? It's fun. It's a little Tamagotchi pet.

Just happen.

An airpods plug in. Sure on the file. Okay, there's another one. There's Olmophile. Hadn't seen that one yet. So you could browse through, find whatever you want, and install it. Let's do Omagotchi because it's a simple one and it'll be easy for you to see.

How I spell it. my gosh

O A G O A G O T C H I

G A C H I

G O, I think.

I think it found it. That's

No. I think it's GO

Typing is weird because I the cr Claude keeps taking over my pr my screen.

I don't know. So it's O A G O T C H I, I think. There's also the auto

Yeah.

complete on the website that's being a little weird right now.

nee, G I see it.

Yeah, like Tamagotchi.

Okay.

Definitely not Tamagotchi. so on here, if you scroll down just a little bit, there will be an install command. So you just copy that command and then just open a terminal window and paste that command. So this will change here shortly. Right now it so you can choose if you want to put put it in the left, right, or center of the bars. So like when you look at your bar you have three sections. This is where you're gonna put your little Tamagotchi person. so like mine's in the center.

Okay.

So now you're good. So you can close that window. And if you look at the top middle, you can see your little omagotchia bouncing.

this guy? That's fun.

So it's an egg. It hasn't hatched yet. It needs a minute. But there's different things you can do once it's once it's grown up, it can, you know, you can clean it, you can feed it, you play with it. And then eventually when it grows up and it's old enough, it can go out and play and it can walk around your desktop system. You can pick it up and put it on top of Windows and stuff.

my gosh. That's fun. I already have four kids, Ryan.

Yeah, well you know, you get more. So it looks like looks like you

Hey look, the script this extension finished, I think, for that.

think you're done. Can so let's see.

Says the shells hot reload kept serving the old cache thing. So I restarted the shell twice. The plugin keeps mark browser tabs ID, blah blah blah. So that means it's done. Let's try it.

Yeah. Control two.

it's working.

I'll be damned.

That's freaking fun. So let's do this. Let's open a couple more windows. it's working. Go here.

That's hilarious.

It is totally working. This is the Windows like experience. I'm gonna how do I how do I

So now this is

publish this bad boy?

it's a little more difficult than it needs to be right now.

Ha ha ha.

So this is one—the marketplace has a new version launching soon, probably before we have this podcast out. When you copied that link, it was pulling from GitHub. Right now, the marketplace validates listings and manifests, but users should still review third-party code. The problem is you're still pulling from GitHub. We're changing that so you'll push the code to us. We'll house and scan it, and you'll pull the code from us rather than a third-party repository. That'll also make it easier to publish. Right now, you have to create a GitHub repo—which you could have Claude help you do—and create a manifest for it. And then submit it to the plugin marketplace so that it can be published. In the future, you'll be able to run `omarchy plugin push` and

Mm.

just push the plugin directly to the marketplace. and you know, you'll authenticate through that whole process, but it'll make it a really seamless. You don't even have to have, I still recommend you have Git or something to track all your you know changes and things, but you would actually wouldn't even have to have that. to in order to push a plugin up. so it makes it super simple and super easy. So this is a case where like you probably do want to replace the default alt tab now because you've created a new alt tab.

Right.

So you could tell Claude, hey, make this my alt tab now. And what Claude will do is go into your Hyprland config files. These are all things you could do yourself. You could go to your Hyprland config files and replace the keybind, redirecting it to your plugin, but you can also just tell your agent to do it. When it gets done, if you hit Alt+Tab, it'll use your plugin instead of the default Hyprland behavior it was using before. So now Alt tabs switcher, you should just be able to use alt tab as normal.

it's working.

So this is the this is the power and this is the point, right? Like not only did you were you able to like have a problem, see a problem, solve a problem, being somebody that like you're not a developer, you're not a like for most part, you're a business and strategy guy, right? You have pieces and parts that you've dabbled in over the years, but like that's where I would class you mostly is in kind of business and strategy. So without having those like hard skills of deep level technology and deep development capabilities, you're able to t to see a problem, define a solution, and create the solution in relatively shorter, I think it like 10 minutes for us to get this something that would have taken It a long time to to figure out otherwise.

Yeah. I mean that just I that was not an easy thing for you know, for anyone to kinda go figure out on their own and it just freaking did it.

Yeah. So the other thing that's that's that also is really cool about this is it's the other side, it's the excitement, right? That the excitement that you have that I can see just evolve through this whole arc, right? The beginning is a little bit frustrating because you're having to fumble over keybinds and then you make you have this idea and you make a plug in and it fucking works. You're like, Holy shit, this is awesome. What else can I do? And So it goes from being something that—like, I saw a guy on Reddit who had a post in the Omarchy subreddit the other day where he was like, you know, What really does Omarchy do that's better than everything else? And and everything he was talking about was like, how does it, how does it help me open videos better? How does it help me connect to an exchange server better? Like, how much how does it make me more efficient at shit that nobody wants to do, anyways? And like, who wants to connect to an exchange server? Number one. and like on some of those, I'll concede, like, yeah, you're right. You know, Linux is still, there are certain things that are still not great in Linux. And that's what we're we're seeking to solve. You don't solve it. By just shoving your head in the sand and and saying, well, it's a problem. I guess we're going back to Windows Land. Once upon a time, macOS sucked ass too. It wasn't until a lot of developers started preferring it as their system that it started to gain market share. And that was even when it got, you know, the full Windows, or not Windows, when it got the full Microsoft Office Suite and all of those other things that have made macOS what it is. But the problem is I think they've they've deviated from that.

Mm-hmm.

But I was like, that's not the part that's not kind of not the point. Kind of part of the point is we should enjoy using our computers again. And we've kind of evolved to this spot where it's all about a it's all about, you know, efficiency and just working for work, which is part of the equ equation, right? Like don't get me wrong, we all we all work for a living, we all have to do something. but we could have a hell of a lot more fun if we have a system that we're able to manipulate and play with. and tweak to be the way that we want it to be, and kind of enjoy the the ride. So that that excitement and joy that you kind of feel when you're like, I have a problem. shit, I just solved that problem. That's pretty cool. What else could I do? And you keep tweaking on it, you keep building plugins, you build, you know, these new little experiences that allow you to make your system uniquely and and fundamentally your system, not somebody else's.

That's really cool. And if I can do this, chances are anybody else can do this too.

Anyway, game. So we just made a whole podcast about Omarchy. But this is how easy it is to try Omarchy today. This was on macOS. We have it on Windows

Well, I I when you

too.

you've been raving about how easy this is to use and you're right. Once you get past the, you know, whatever it is, five minute learning curve of how do I do basic things, it's it's pretty intuitive, pretty easy to use.

Yeah. There are even some what's the Think somebody made it's I think it's like learnomarchy.com. Yeah. So somebody made

no, that would be a tricky help.

a a plugin. This plugin's actually fucking cool. It's at learnomarchy.com.

Ooh, the egg hatched.

There you go. There's your little guy.

There he is.

He's gotta grow up a little bit. but this person made this whole experience where you can install let's install this actually. Fuck it. We're already here. We can cut this if we decide th this is too long, but I think this will be fun. Where do we go? Scroll, hit open release. I need to put this guy's thing on OPR so it's much easier. download, click learn dash omarchi dash zero two two one dash any package the tar Z S D. scroll down a little bit. Keep

Yeah I see.

going down. Go down to where it says ask like scroll down. Keep going. Under assets, download

this thing?

that second file. And then Open your terminal. And hit C D space downloads with a capital D. enter and then hit s pseudo pacman dash capital u Like hyphen capital U. space after Pac-Man. So it's a flag. And then dash U. space.

Don't live in terminal, Ryan.

I know. Just d it's funny talking to people who don't live in terminal because you do like I can say this command to someone like Jake, and he just knows inherently where to put the spaces and where to put

Right.

like he knows that like this is a flag that you're passing to Pac like Pac-Man's a command, dash U is the flag. But other people like you fumble around a little bit and that's fine. It's something you learn. and then type learn and it's the only file it's in there, so just hit tab. there you go. Hit enter. Type password. So this is installing a package. hit hit up. I I didn't realize you untarred that folder. And then hit dot and then hit tab. There you go. Install that one. Then just hit enter. I guess we had to pick up one those. Well, it should have defaulted. Do you wanna skip the no. Hey, enter.

No.

Yeah. Why is it angry? Actually, failed a satisfied terminal exactly.

Real time problem solving here.

I know. Cannot resolve xdg-terminal-exec. xdg-terminal-exec is probably also not built for ARM. Fuck. This is the challenge we're gonna face with ARM. This is actually great because it helps suss out some of the problems we have for ARM, but xdg-terminal-exec is probably not built for ARM in the Arch Linux ARM package repos. So we're gonna

Mm.

have to figure out how to build that one itself. And I actually don't know how to get around this for this. Anyways, I guess we'll skip this for now.

Yeah.

This guy built Learn Omarchy, and it's really cool. It has a whole interactive experience that pops up on the screen and teaches you how to use Omarchy as a new user, using characters to do it. So like you've got those two

Mm, diesel guys.

Yeah, you got those two characters. That dude'll fly around the screen and show you like, Hey, here's this and like, okay, open up open up the launcher with super space and then you open it up and it's like these are your applications and

My God, it's actually a helpful clippy.

Somebody did make Clippy. There is a clippy in the marketplace.

That's awesome.

But it's really cool. And you I think there's you know, achievements and stuff like that I think that you can do in there. I've seen a few other learning guides where like somebody has like keybind flashcards. It'll pop up flashcards and you hit the keybinds and it keeps track of how how good you are at I've seen a couple other takes on something like this so far. And other things. So this is something that we definitely need to add more of, like whether it's something like this that comes out of the box or is very easy to install out of the box. the onboarding aspect of it, as you kind of felt, is like if you've used

Bumping.

tiling window management before, it's good. We've tried to make it as easy as possible by directing you. Like that that first pop-up tells you, you know, hit super K to get to your keybinds. And that as long as you know that, you can figure anything out. Like if you're

Yeah.

even if you're stuck. You can hit super K and then you can just search for what you're looking for. and over time, it probably takes about three days to build the muscle memory, and then you're just cruising. but those first three days are a little fumbly. And then once you kind of discover getting plugins built, once you discover being able to change, you know, things, so like on your system, because you're on a Because you're on a Mac and it's it's hijacking, which is strange. On my Mac, it did not hijack the like super space. But because you're having that thing, you might decide like, hey, I want to I want to change my Amarty menu to not be super space. I want it to be, you know, super alt space or alt space or something like that. that's something that you could also tell Claude to do, and Claude could do that. To tweak the system and make it yours. the keybinds menu actually reads from your live keybinds. So if you have Claude change your keybinds, they'll show up in there. So like chances are if you search in the keybinds, if you search for like alt tab or window switch or something like that, you'll see your your other alt tab. Try just searching for tab. That's probably less used than alt. next window or tab. So

Next window or tab.

next window or tab, which is not what it was by default. If I do if I search for tab on mine, alt tab is focus on next window and alt shift tab is focus on previous window.

Pretty freaking cool.

So all that stuff is parsed directly from your active, live Hyprland configs. If you have Claude customize them to be something else, they'll show up as something else.

What did I do here? I like pulled this thing out.

You floated that window. So if you hit super T, that'll put it back in as a tile.

yeah, okay.

Generally floating windows like I'll use floating windows for like if I need to take a a conference call and just like float it out or something. 'Cause you can also pen windows. So if you do like take that one and just float it again.

I accidentally played a video. What is it, T?

Yep. And then you can resize it by holding super and then right click and dragging.

I see.

So if you size that one, like s shrink that one down, 'cause we're gonna pin it. And then if you hit the super O. hit super O again. There you go. So now it's floated and pinned. So if you go to hit super two. So that window

nice.

stays. So when you think about things like you know, we sit in Google Meets a lot. A lot of times I'll take those and pin those at the bottom corner of my screen. And

Mm-hmm.

then it's just chilling there. I can still switch back and forth between my workspaces if I need to. but the you know, meet that I'm in is still there. And if you hit super O, it'll restore it back to a tile.

Nice. How did I change this to go because the tiling is like all vertical now? Or did I do that on purpose?

So you did super L, probably changed it to scrolling mode. no. You run Runner. You probably just dragged some windows around in like a weird way and got paired up.

I see.

'Cause it looks back it looks like it's back to normal now. So that's it.

Pretty cool experience. I'm excited to play around with it and see how much other things I can break or or make in the process.

Yeah. Now you have a f you have a fully functioning Omarchy system on your Mac system. And I mean, using it it's fairly performant. you know, there's nothing I don't it's a little hard 'cause you're screen sharing, but it's

Yeah. Well I'm using a I'm using a bunch of memory on the Mac side to even do that. So

And you're recording at the same time, but everything seems to be snappy. Even playing video, it did everything just fine. But yeah, that's how you try Omarchy. There are Windows and Mac versions. The goal with these is to let you try Omarchy if you're not quite ready to make the plunge, you don't have a system it can run on yet, or you're still waiting for us to get full M-series Mac support. to run it natively. This is one hell of an option to be able to run it for now. and be able to kinda get an experience, play with it, and then switch over to the real thing when the time comes.

Heck yeah, man. This has been fun.

Yeah.

Be prepared. I'm probably gonna have lots of questions.

Ha ha ha.

You did this to me.

I am aware of what I've done. I've also given myself two packages I gotta go figure out how to fix now.

All right. Well, this is this is pretty fun. We should do it again. But till next time.

Yeah, till next time.