Omarchy

Um is an opinionated mix of Hyperland and Arch Linux. I've set it up after using omacoup for about a year which was an opinionated setup of Ubuntu and Gnome. But what I found in Hyperland is quite remarkable. It is an unbelievably smooth experience to use a computer. I've heard about tiling window managers in the past. I'd even tried a couple of them, but really until trying Hyperland, I didn't realize that it would click for me in the way it has. Hyperland is not just gorgeous in all of its animations and its setup. It is also a complete delight to use. The one thing about Hyperland though is it comes as a million different pieces and config files that you have to carefully figure out how to work together and how to set it all up. And that's what I've spent an ungodly amount of time actually doing. So now that I have finished my own setup that I use on a daily basis at this point to do everything that I do on development and whatnot, I thought I'd share it just like I did with Amakoup. So Omachi is that compilation of my aesthetics, my preferences, and my default applications as I run my computer on either a framework laptop or a desktop. Bottomatch is also not for everyone. Hyperland and Arch is a little bit more um I don't even know if I want to say advanced, but it can certainly be slightly more nerdy. There's a lot of configuration and setup that happens in config files spread out over the system where you might be used to just having a guey to set things up. So if you're new to Linux, I would recommend that you check out. It's still a wonderful distribution. I've used it for over a year. It is really great. It's easy to get going with. But if you are ready for a little more, if you're curious about tiling window managers, Umachi is a great way to experience all that Hyperland and Arch has to offer. Let's get going. So, let's dive into Umachi. And by diving into Umachi, it's really diving into Hyperland because Hyperland is the heart of Omachi here. And it's an amazing tiling window manager. And as you can see here, um there are no icons, there's no dock, there's nothing to click on. you drive everything through the keyboard. So the first thing we can do is hit superb. That starts a new browser. And then I can hit super enter and I get a new terminal right next to it. And that's really how you start applications. We can start one more here. If I hit app or super t, I'm going to start um btop down below. If I hit super W, I close it again. If I hit a super shift arrow, I can swap the positions of these. And if I hit uh super J, I um change it from horizontal to vertical uh alignment. Here, if I bring this top back, you can also see that I can pop windows from one workspace, we're in workspace number one here, to another workspace, and it'll retile that workspace. So, if I hit super shift 2, boom, it jumped over in workspace two where I already had another terminal. And I can jump right back. Super shift uh one. And I'll go back to workspace number one. I'll close this back down again. I can close this one. And as you can see, you're not resizing anything. The windows will just automatically fill the screen as they see fit. But you don't actually have to do it like that. Let's imagine you just have one uh browser for example on a single workspace and you don't want it that wide. You can hit super P and then you get to resize it by holding down super and the right arrow button. And look how nice that is. It is just centering it. So if I'm reading something and I have this alone on my uh workspace, I can just narrow down like that. If I hit super P again, it'll go back to the tiling mode. And here I am with uh with everything. Now those are just some of the applications. There are a bunch bound by default. And some of the ones I really like is the fact that you can bind web apps with the same level of fidelity and feel as you would bind any other application. For example, on super a I have chatbt. So, I can just pop it up and ask, uh, what is Omachi? And while it's figuring that out, um, I can hop up here and do some other work, do whatever. I can start my filing manager, for example, that's Nautilus, um, and see all my files here. You can actually also hold down super and then left arrow button and drag the um, the window around if you want to scale it differently here. Um, and again, we can use that super J to get a different uh layout of it. If, for example, I want um this in the middle, I'll hold down super and the right arrow and I can readjust everything down here. Um, pretty cool. Now, what's funny about Omachi is that it's built on top of Arch, which basically ships with nothing in the box. And I have jammed everything into the box, everything that I need on a regular basis to do my work. So, let's shut this one down. And then, for example, I have Super M. I have my music here from Spotify. Um, I have u Neovim on Super N. I have uh my signal on Super G. I have even X on Super X. But let's close all this up again. and see another neat feature of omachi that I've built in. So if you hold down u super control shift space, boom, you're gonna pop to a different theme is cappuccin. Um jump to another theme ever forest. Let's actually have a look at um this while we do it because you see that the terminal which is elacrity will change its view and layout along with the themes as we jump through these themes. There are uh six of them in all uh none of them are light themed right now. They're all dark themed, but they extend their theming across uh a bunch of different applications. The default editor that I use here is Neovim, which I think is an awesome editor. You can of course install whatever you like. But if we hop in and have a look at the config here, I have neoim and just n and then dot to jump into the um current directory, we can see here is the config for hyperland that's set up. These are some of the extra bindings for especially web apps that I've set up. You can just change these to something else. I run Dropbox. um on this setup as well. And here are all the defaults. You can have a look at these defaults and you can of course override them with whatever you like and you can see what the default applications are set to. But now that I mentioned Dropbox, let's have a quick look at the menu bar up here. So this bar up here is run by something called way bar. It has the uh workspaces. It has the time of day and you can actually click on that to see the date. Click back to go back on time. And then over here it has all those control services that are running. I have my Dropbox just giving me an update if anything is updating. I have my uh Bluetooth. I have my Ethernet that shows uh upload and download speeds. And then I have uh my volume, which by the way, if you hover over that and you use the scroll wheel on your uh on your mouse, you can turn it up and down. And if you right click on it, you can mute it. Right click again to unmute it. And then we have um the CPU usage which actually if you just click on that it'll load Btop as we were just running before. And then finally here I also have the performance profile. You can click on that to cycle between the different profiles. This is a desktop it doesn't really matter so much but on a laptop it's quite nice. So let's h of all this. Now I've shown you a bunch of ways to start these different applications just using the keyboard. You can of course also start things through the launcher. Hold down super and then press space and you will see this nicely themed launcher that'll show all the applications that are installed on the system by default that I've installed. As you can see here, if we actually go from the top um we have the about page just showing fast fetch on what this kind of machine is. This is on my Intel box. But if we hop back here, I have one password set up. It's a wonderful password manager and with the latest version that basically is still in beta but I've baked into it. It works finally properly with Whan all the copy and pasting. Uh none of those issues. There were actually a bunch of those issues. I needed Chrome uh 138 to come out because there was some issues there too. Things are a little bit bleeding edge. That is a little bit how it is on on Arch, but I finally managed to nail it all down into a cohesive package that just works. Um, this one is fun. So, with Docker, I have it set up for Lacy Docker, which is amazing, where you can see all the um different stats, you can see all the different containers you're running, all the different images that you have. This is uh super nice for developers. Um, let's see what else we hide here. There's a bunch of web apps that I just use. There's GitHub and some Google platforms. There's Hey. Um, and then there's Caden Live, which is a great video editor. That's what I'm now using to edit all my videos. They come straight out of OBS Studio, which is what I'm using to record this with. Of course, we have Libra Office, which I don't use a lot except for opening Microsoft Office files for one reason or another. Um, it's there. It's nice to have just all these things so compatibility is not an issue. Um, let's see what else we got here. As I mentioned, OP Studio for recording things. Oh, Obsidian is really nice. Obsidian is a um great notetaking app. Um, Pinta, which is essentially like a Microsoft Paint or or whatever uh setup when you just need to make small adjustments to images or paint on something or whatever else you have you. That's pretty nice. Which brings me to another point actually. Um, I've also hooked up uh screenshotting with something called Hypershot. You just press print screen and you'll drag it around and it will save the screenshot and it'll also place it on the clipboard. I think maybe we can actually even paste it in here. Let's just do that. Um, no. Oh, okay. Oh, it was an image of the app itself. That's confusing for a little second there. Let's jump back out of this and see what else we got uh installed by default. Um, as I mentioned, uh, Steam and Spotify to, um, Pora is what I use to actually write all of my essays. I do have a license. I just haven't entered it on on this machine. And you can push, uh, F11 to go into full screen and say, "This is a demo of Omachi." I love this writing environment. It is so pure, clean, and without any form of distraction. But let's hop out of that again. I think that's almost um the end of the Oh, the volume control. That is actually a good one to have a quick look at. It is also available if you just click on the little uh speaker up here. But as you can see, there's different uh ways you can set this up mainly with the input and output devices. So, if you're not hearing something on your lovely LX2 speakers, it's probably because this little flag has to be clicked such that you set it as a default and it's playing on the internal um internal servers or internal uh speakers. Oh, Zoom as well. I have lots of um wonderful meetings on that platform. Uh even something like YouTube. Again, this is just a web app, but look how nice it looks that there's nothing around it. It is simply just the content itself. There is no things for minimizing, maximizing. You know how to do that. You know how to do it on the keyboard. You just hit super W if you want to want to close it. Which actually brings me to another point here that's pretty neat. When I jump back and forth these with super arrow keys, you can see there's an outline of the window that's active. But look at the cursor too. The cursor will actually also move back and forth. That's super nice when you have a larger screen than this. Normally I work on a 6K XDR monitor, so I have a bunch of different um windows open at the same time. And when you have all of these windows around, when you jump into something, it has focus. And now you're moving the mouse over there. You hop over here, boom, now the mouse has focus over there. One of those little things with tiling window managers that I didn't actually know was a thing, but it is absolutely wonderful in practice. Well, let's hop back to Tokyo Nights, which is the default theme that I use. And I'll show you one more thing. Tokyo Nights is the the one theme that I've set up since it has two possible backgrounds here. If you hold super control and then space, you jump between the two backgrounds that are set up. So, let's actually have a look at that. If I just do um super P here, and I'm going to make it nice and square. We're going to hop into config, then into umachi. Have a look at that. We have the backgrounds that are being used. You see there's one directory for each theme. And if we hop into Tokyo night, you can see that there are two. These are two that we can go back and forth between. But I'll show you here how it's actually set up. So when we switch the themes back and forth, it's all just done with sim links. So these siblings are being changed. When I change the background here, we can do the simling again. You saw that the bottom one background now points to a different image. This is how everything is tied in with the default files which you can actually see here. We can make our own themes. Well, I made all these themes by copying things off the internet and putting them in there. But if you want to add your own theme, you can see we have six themes by default. You can just add your your own inside that uh themes folder. And if we hop into say this one capine, you can see exactly what's in there. Now let's start neoim and then have a look. You have elacrity. That's the terminal that we're in. Um you have the background which is this setup for let's just do this where you can uh download the background images off the internet. So you don't need to include it and gum up the git repo for it. Um let's see. We got the btop here. That was this one. that is nicely styled with the theme that we're on. Um, what else we got? We got the hyperlang config which is basically just for the outline by you can see on Tokyo nice we got this cool um gradient one that changes colors on the others it's a bit of a more of a a solid color but you can do it whichever way you want. then hyper lock which is your lock screen and you'll get to that on um super escape super escape and it'll lock the screen and you can enter your um your password there and the coloring of that is also nicely fit with the different themes. Marco is the um notification manager. You saw the little outline when we change between the themes up there. Theme changed to Capuin. You see that also changes color. That's actually done with uh with macro. One thing you can notice here is that as we're changing these themes, the elacrity terminal updates, but the Neo Vim does um does not. For Neo Vim to update, you actually have to quit it and go back into it again. We can actually see here on Neo Vim that also have a theme specific um setup. And for Cappuccin, obviously, it's just loading in that. We got the way bar um setup. That's what changes that top bar as we go through things. And then woy, that's the application launcher as I showed you here. You can see that's themed. If I jump uh let's see over to Grub Bugs and then open it. You can see it's nicely themed. Doesn't that just look lovely? I think this is the best looking desktop environment that I have ever used. It is certainly also the most pleasant. Hyperland is simply a delight. And once you get used to just starting everything straight off key commands that you're not writing anything out, it's like one hotkey, one hotkey will uh literally start anything that you want to do. It is extremely addictive to work like this. And when you go back to something else that doesn't that isn't set up in this way, it kind of just feels broken. So um this is um and by um this is really hyperland. I have just wrapped all these things that you need to have copy and paste working to oh actually speaking of copy and paste we have this uh nice little setup where you can hit caps lock um space e and it'll actually insert your email address because when you set up a machi it'll ask for your email addresses and it can configure your git credentials. You can also do caps lock space N. You're going to get your name there. And then, of course, we have emojis. That's caps lock uh M and then Y, for example, for a thumbs up. You can look at all of those things on the manual site for this manuals on my Let's see. Yep, we got the Umachi manual here. Oh, another thing that's really neat. So when you um move between these windows with your cursor, there's instant focus. So you don't have to click on something to make it focus first. As soon as I move over here, I can write. As soon as I move over here, I can write up here. But if we hop down and have a look at um all these hotkeys, you can see there's quite a lot. There's quite a lot of hot keys. There's a bunch of hotkeys for controlling all these uh the appearances, the next theme and background image. There's a bunch of hot keys for the system, for locking it, for restarting Hyperline, for restarting the computer and and so on and so forth. But you'll get the hang of that really quick and you will be amazed at how well it feels to operate a system like that. So that's it. That is Umachi. Now, let me show you how to install it by first installing Arch Linux and then running the Umachi installer. So let's install Arch Linux. I'm going to assume that you've downloaded the ISO, that you've put it onto a USB key, and that's what we're booting off here. As you can see, this is the Arch Linux installed boot screen, and it's going to run for a second, and then it's going to dump you straight into the terminal. If you are running off Wi-Fi, run the WCTL utility. I have another little clip on that showing you how to connect. It's actually quite simple, but still a little strange if you've been used to using a guey to set up your new OS, but I'm on Ethernet with this machine. So, we're going to jump straight into running the Arch Install uh TUI and you know, I love a good TUI and the Arch Install TUI is really easy to go through. There's not that many steps you need. It just looks a little strange again if you are not familiar to this way of installing an OS. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to set up our mirrors. That's where we're going to download all the software from. We're going to select regions. And you see a long list here. And then you can see down in the lower left corner I'm typing slash uni to sort down the list so that I get just the United States which I'm going to pick as my region. So I have the servers close to me. We're going to back out of that and then we are going to do the most important thing which is the disk configuration. The first thing you're going to do is set up the partitioning on the disc that you're installing Arch on. So, we're going to do that. We're going to use the default layout. Um, you hit space to select the drive and then return. And then you're going to pick your file system. I'm just going to use the recommended BT RFS. And we're going to use the default structure for that as well. We're going to use compression. And you can figure all that stuff out later what that means. In the end, it should look something like this on an NVME drive probably on your machine. This is just running inside of uh Qumo KVM. But here comes the important part. You must you must turn on disk encryption when you're using Arch to run Umachi. Um is set up in such a way that it'll automatically lock you into the user that we're going to create in just a second. And of course, that's not going to work very well if you don't have any protection on that computer. So, the best kind of protection to get on that computer is to get disk encryption, which requires you to enter a password to even access the drive. So, that's what we're going to set up. So, you're going to hop down to disk encryption. You're going to hit return here. Pick Lux. You're going to enter an encryption password. Um, obviously secure that somehow. This is where all the crown jewels are hidden. And then key. And I made this mistake before myself installing this. If you do not go down to partitions and then apply that encryption to the drive that you just set up, nothing's going to happen. So you hit space and you hit return. And then boom, it should look just like this. Now you know that you've set up your Lux encryption. It's got a password and it's been applied to the volume. That's it. But that is the most important part of this entire setup process. When you're using Arch for Umachi, um we're just going to continue with the grub boot loader. You might use um system D loader. Doesn't really matter. Set up your host name. Pick something for that machine. That works really well when you're on um VPN or whatever you're referring to it later. Setting the root password for the machine. And then we're going to add a user account. Um, I'm going to just add my DHH account here and enter the password for that. And now we've entered four passwords. Um, already that should be quite enough. And we should be ready to go. Of course, you want to be part of the pseudo clan. On audio, you're going to use pipe wire. And on network configuration, you're just going to copy over whatever you set up to do the install. And then finally, we're going to add one additional package. We're going to add wget. You can do the same trick here. Here you see slashwget to sort down the list because we're going to use wget to install omachi with. So we pick that and we're also going to pick a time zone. Again here you can use the slash to narrow down if you need. Jump into install. Pick yes. And 5 4 3 2 1. The drive is wiped out. And it's going to take a couple of minutes. It actually goes quite fast especially if you have a fast pipe here. And when you're done you're just going to reboot. the system and Arch is going to start back up and you're going to enter that password for the full encryption to your root drive. Then you're going to log in and you're going to be ready to install Umachi. This is what you're going to write.

An opinionated Hyprland + Arch setup. Learn more on https://omarchy.org.