Zenbu

全部 — a theme-aware launcher for everything.

Zenbu is an everything-launcher for Omarchy: press one key and get six tabs — Apps, Emoji, Files, Calc, Windows, and SSH — in a single overlay that is themed by your active Omarchy theme, automatically, with no configuration. It is built for the keyboard, like the rest of Omarchy: type to filter, Tab to change tabs, Enter to act, Esc to leave.

You decide how it appears. On first open a short greeter walks you through the choices — which hotkey should summon it (you press the keys, nothing is predefined), whether it pops up in the middle of the screen or drops down from a bar icon, whether to show the 全 icon in the bar at all (and where), and what clicking an emoji does. Every choice can be changed later from the ⚙ in the footer, or Ctrl + comma.

The tabs

• Apps — every installed application, with icons, fuzzy-searched by the shell's own app library. Enter launches. On Omarchy 4.0.3, where the shell withholds that library from third-party plugins, Zenbu builds its own copy of it (see How it works).
• Emoji — search by name ("shrug", "fire"), shown large enough to actually tell apart. Enter types the emoji into the app you came from.
• Files — type part of a filename and get instant results from across your home folder, hidden dot-folders like ~/.config included (a settings toggle, on by default; powered by fd, with cache/build/backup/Steam junk excluded so it stays fast). A second toggle, off by default, also searches the system areas /usr, /etc and /opt. Enter opens with the default app. An empty search shows your home folder.
• Calc — a live calculator and unit converter on the full qalculate engine: 6 feet to meters, 15% * 4300, sqrt(2). Enter copies the result. 100 euros in jpy works as well as to, and currency answers carry the date of the rates they were worked out from — see Exchange rates.
• Windows — every open window; Enter focuses it.
• SSH — the hosts from your ~/.ssh/config; Enter connects in a terminal.

Keys

Key	Action
type anything	Filter the current tab
Tab / Shift+Tab	Next / previous tab
← / →	Previous / next tab
↑ / ↓ / PgUp / PgDn	Move the selection
Enter	Launch / type / open / focus / connect / copy
Ctrl + comma	Open settings
Esc	Clear the search, then close

The mouse works too: click a tab, click a row, and drag any edge or corner of the card to resize it — the size is remembered. A fixed footer shows the keys, with the ⚙ settings on its far right.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/weedwhitesandwine/Zenbu.git --enable

Then open it once by hand to meet the greeter:

omarchy-shell shell toggle io.github.weedwhitesandwine.zenbu

The greeter records your hotkey (press the keys you want — pick a combination nothing else uses), your summon style (centered pop-up, or dropdown from the bar icon), and whether the 全 bar icon is shown. From then on your own hotkey and/or the icon summon it.

Requirements

• fd (Files tab) and wl-clipboard (copying) ship with Omarchy's base install — nothing to do.
• The Calc tab needs the qalc calculator, which Omarchy does not install by default. Without it the tab simply tells you so; enable it with one command: omarchy pkg add libqalculate.
• SSH connections open in your own terminal (whatever Omarchy is configured to use) — no specific terminal required.

Exchange rates

qalculate answers currency conversions from a rates file, and libqalculate ships one inside its own package — so on a fresh install 100 euros to jpy is worked out from whatever the rates were on the day your distribution built that package, which can be months old.

Zenbu reads the date out of that file and prints it beside the answer (rates 6 Jul), so a stale rate is always labelled as one. That happens with the packaged file and needs nothing from you.

Refreshing it is a separate choice. Set Exchange rates to refresh daily in settings and Zenbu runs qalc -e once per session, the first time you open the Calc tab, unless the rates file was already written today. The test is when the file was last fetched rather than the date the ECB stamped inside it: the ECB publishes only on business days, so the date in the file is legitimately older than today at weekends and before the afternoon fix, and gating on it would download the same file repeatedly. That is qalculate's own updater: it fetches from the European Central Bank and writes qalculate's rates files in ~/.local/share/qalculate/, which then take precedence over the packaged copy. The setting starts at packaged, so this only ever happens after you turn it on.

How it works

Zenbu is a Quickshell overlay running inside the Omarchy shell. Colors, fonts, spacing, and corner radii all come from the shell's theme system, so it always matches the active theme with nothing to configure. Apps come from the shell's shared application library (the same source as the Omarchy menu), windows from the Wayland toplevel list, emoji from Omarchy's own emoji data, and file results from fd run on demand.

What Zenbu writes, and when:

• Its remembered card size and your settings, in ~/.local/state/zenbu/ — its own state, nothing shared.

• When you apply a hotkey in the greeter or settings (and only then), a clearly-marked block in ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua via the bundled zenbu-ctl.sh. It only ever replaces its own marked block — the rest of the file is never touched — and removing the hotkey removes the block.

• When you toggle the bar icon or move it (and only then), Zenbu's own entry in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json: it is placed in the bar layout to show the icon, or parked in the enabled-plugins list to hide it — only Zenbu's entry is ever touched, and the shell reloads the file automatically.

• When you have set Exchange rates to refresh daily (and only then), qalc -e runs once per session on first opening the Calc tab, unless the rates file in ~/.local/share/qalculate/ was already written today. It is qalculate's own updater: it reaches the European Central Bank for current rates and writes qalculate's rates files in that directory. Reading that file's timestamp is the only thing Zenbu does with it; the file is opened without following symlinks and must be a regular file. The setting ships as packaged.

Every one of those writes is staged under an exclusively-created temporary name beside the destination and renamed over it in one atomic step, so an interruption never leaves a half-written file and a symlink planted at any of those names is never written through.

The commands Zenbu runs are fd (file search), qalc (Calc tab, capped at half a second per calculation, and qalc -e for the refresh above), python3 (reading files to a byte ceiling), wl-copy, bash for the bundled zenbu-ctl.sh, and your terminal for an SSH connection. Each is started on demand and exits on its own.

On Omarchy 4.0.3 the shell hands third-party plugins no application library (omacom/omarchy#10661), so Zenbu instantiates the shell's own AppLibrary component itself. That runs the same two things the shell runs for the Omarchy menu: the shell's hidden-entries.sh script and a find over the XDG icon directories, once when Zenbu loads and again whenever an application is installed or removed. Launching an app then goes through uwsm-app -- gtk-launch, exactly as the shell's own library does. On every other Omarchy version the shell's library is used and this stand-in is never built.

Nothing runs on a timer, and nothing is changed until you explicitly apply it in the greeter or settings.

Uninstall

If you set a hotkey, remove Zenbu's block from bindings.lua first (or just delete the marked block by hand), then remove the plugin:

~/.config/omarchy/plugins/io.github.weedwhitesandwine.zenbu/zenbu-ctl.sh unbind
omarchy plugin remove io.github.weedwhitesandwine.zenbu

License

MIT

Built with Claude Code.