Omaxian — a port of the Omarchy shell

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A port of the Omarchy shell to debian-based distros on X11 / XLibre + i3

Get it on GitHub How to install

omaxian@linux: booting session

booting session …[  ok  ]  elogind session registered — no systemd, no uwsm[  ok  ]  connected to i3 IPC socket[  ok  ]  picom compositor started[  ok  ]  dunst notification daemon startedstarting quickshell (omarchy-shell) …[  ok  ]  bar mounted: workspaces, clock, network, tray[  ok  ]  widgets loaded: media (mpDris2), weather, sysstats, vpn, apt[  ok  ]  dock mounted — 6 pinnedloading plugins from ~/.local/share/omarchy/shell/plugins …[  ok  ]  37 first-party plugins registeredscanning ~/.config/omarchy/plugins (community, opt-in) …[  ok  ]  4 found, 0 enabledapplying theme nebula-ridge (23 installed) …[  ok  ]  theme applied — Alt+Ctrl+T to switch[  ok  ]  redshift night light armed[  ok  ]  omarchy-* commands linked into PATHsession ready.

About

Omaxian brings the Omarchy shell — its bar, dock, menu, themes and omarchy-* commands — to the Debian family on X11 / XLibre and i3, with no Wayland, no Hyprland and no systemd.

It is not a distribution. Omarchy is a complete Arch-based system; Omaxian ports only its shell. Because X11 / XLibre and Wayland differ deeply, the two are only partially compatible — some Hyprland-era pieces work differently here, and a few not at all.

Omaxian is built on Omarchy by DHH and 37signals, and reuses its shell, themes and omarchy-* command set under the MIT licence. Omarchy is the original; Omaxian only carries it to X11. omarchy.org

What Omaxian adds

Not just a backend swap. These pieces have no upstream counterpart — they exist because X11 / i3 / Debian needed them, or because a GUI was missing.

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Control PanelSuper+Ctrl+O Audio, Bluetooth, wallpaper, theme and monitors in one tabbed popup — a single gear on the bar.
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SettingsSuper+Ctrl+S A real window to edit bar layout, dock chrome, plugins, fonts and startup apps — including a new dual-pane, drag-and-drop editor for arranging bar widgets.
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Floating island bar Optional inset, rounded bar chrome — the same idea as the dock’s pill. A Settings → Bar toggle, not a rebuild.
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Dock A persistent bottom dock: pinned apps, running-app dots, hover magnification. First-party, not a plugin.
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Display profilesSuper+Ctrl+D xrandr resolution / on / off / primary / position, with layouts saved per output topology and laptop-lid handling.
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Lock screenSuper+Ctrl+L i3lock-omaxian with screenshot / image / random backgrounds and blur, plus optional idle auto-lock via xss-lock and xset.
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Community plugins Curated third-party ports — weather, disposable alarms, email — install opt-in under ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/, vetted by omarchy-plugin-check, -validate and -update.
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SysStats · VPN · apt CPU / GPU / RAM on the bar, a VPN indicator, and a live count of apt-upgradable packages.
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Media widget MPD sits next to every other MPRIS player through mpDris2 — one control for all of them.
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Help on the barSuper+K The “?” widget: a cheat-sheet of this session’s i3 binds, always one key away.
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Cross-distro session omarchy-host picks systemd, elogind or plain shutdown(8) at runtime, so the same power/session commands work on Debian, Devuan and Ubuntu. PulseAudio or PipeWire; apt instead of pacman; redshift for night light.

Community plugins

Opt-in, third-party shell ports live in community-plugins/ — never installed by deploy.sh.

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Better Weather Open-Meteo, wttr.in and RainViewer forecasts on the bar. QML compatible as-is. io.github.guiestrela.weather
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Swiss Weather MeteoSwiss bar weather for Switzerland. QML compatible as-is. jmaeder.swissweather
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Nag Disposable alarms — calendar user timers become a wall-clock sleeper. jankeesvw.nag
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Omamail Gmail / HEY / JMAP / IMAP email client with a Rust backend, v0.9.0. omamail

More plugins can join this list. Run omarchy-plugin-check against any other Omarchy community plugin first — a clean pass means it already works as-is; flagged Wayland / Hyprland / PipeWire / systemd couplings just mean it needs a quick port before it's ready.

Browse community-plugins/ →

On screen

Menu — Apps and omarchy-* commands in one launcher. — **Menu** — Apps and omarchy-* commands in one launcher.

Media — MPD alongside every MPRIS player. — **Media** — MPD alongside every MPRIS player.

Settings — Bar, dock, widgets and startup apps — no text editor needed. — **Settings** — Bar, dock, widgets and startup apps — no text editor needed.

Key bindings — Super+K cheat-sheet of this session’s binds. — **Key bindings** — Super+K cheat-sheet of this session’s binds.

Control Panel — Audio, Bluetooth, wallpaper, theme and monitors. — **Control Panel** — Audio, Bluetooth, wallpaper, theme and monitors.

Power menu — Lock, suspend, reboot, shut down. — **Power menu** — Lock, suspend, reboot, shut down.

Install

You need an X11 session with i3 and a login path that runs /etc/X11/Xsession (most display managers do; startx with a proper .xsession also works). Then log out and back in — not i3 restart.

Regularly tested against Debian 13, Devuan Excalibur, Xubuntu 26.

Stock Ubuntu 26.04 shipped with X11 removed entirely — install Xubuntu instead, or add it to Ubuntu with `sudo apt install xubuntu-desktop`.

~/projects

git clone https://github.com/aozora/omaxian ~/projects/omaxiancd ~/projects/omaxiansudo ./setup.sh # packages, fonts, session D-Bus./install.sh # themes + omarchy-* commands./deploy.sh # i3 / Quickshell / ~/.xsessionrc

Where it is not 1:1 with Omarchy

Omaxian tracks the Omarchy shell, but X11 / XLibre is not Wayland and i3 is not Hyprland — so parity is partial by design.

Click-outside does not always close a popup — a widget anchored to the bar may stay open if you click into another window. Close it with Escape, the same widget, or the same keybind.
No dimming overlay. Full-screen Omarchy scrims would go black under picom; panels are small popups instead.
The bar cannot be dragged to another screen or reordered by dragging widgets — you edit it in Settings.
There is no uwsm; commands fall back to ${OMARCHY_PATH:=$HOME/.local/share/omarchy}.
Reminders use sleep, not systemd timers. Night light is redshift, not hyprsunset.
It is the same shell running on X11/i3 — not a Hyprland session.