I put Omarchy on a 2017 T1 MacBook Pro recently. Getting the Apple hardware to behave took a little work. Once it did, I started changing the little things that make a computer feel like mine.
That part has been a lot of fun. Agents on Omarchy are a first class experience: I can tell an agent what I want, try the result a couple of minutes later, and share it if it turns out to be useful. Here are three things I made for my machine.
A system monitor in the bar
I like being able to glance up and see what my computer is doing. The system monitor widget puts CPU, RAM, disk, network traffic, and fan speed in the Omarchy bar. Hover over it for the actual numbers and CPU temperature. Click it and btop opens if I want the whole picture.
It reads from /proc and /sys, uses the active Omarchy theme, and hides readings the hardware doesn’t provide. My Mac’s fan needed its own little exception, because of course it did.
Boot time, right on the boot screen
Omarchy’s install on this Mac took two minutes and change. I wanted the same little bit of instant feedback every time I turned the machine on, so I made omarchy-boottime.
It shows the time on the disk unlock screen, between the logo and the password box. The number includes firmware, bootloader, kernel, and initramfs time up to that prompt. It’s a small thing, but seeing the number every boot is satisfying. I also suggested it upstream as an option for everyone.
Super + Space, then just type
On my Mac, Alfred is basically how I talk to the computer: Command + Space and start typing. Omarchy already has the first part with Super + Space. The one thing I missed was being able to type something that isn’t an app or setting and have it search the web.
omarchy-menu-search adds that last step. If the menu finds a match, it behaves as usual. If it finds nothing, it offers one row to search the web. Press Enter and the query opens in the default browser. You can change the search engine too.
That sounds almost too small to bother with. But it’s the difference between a launcher I use sometimes and one I can use without thinking.
The part I like most
None of these is a giant application. They’re little adjustments to a computer I use every day. I described a missing behavior to an agent, checked what it built, and a couple of minutes later my desktop did the thing I wanted. Then I could put the code on GitHub so someone else can plug it in.
That’s a pretty cool way to use a computer. It feels less like accepting whatever the desktop shipped with and more like making the tool I actually want to use.
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