Toggles, Idle & the Screensaver

A lot of what you change day to day isn’t really a setting. It’s a mode you flip on for an hour and off again: night light while you’re working late, do not disturb while you’re presenting, stay awake while you’re watching something. Omarchy calls those toggles, and they all work the same way — a hotkey, a menu entry, and a command, all hitting the same switch.

The toggle menu

Super + Ctrl + O opens Trigger > Toggle directly, or you can walk there from the Omarchy menu (Super + Space). Everything in that list is a switch you can flip without thinking about where the state lives.

From the terminal, the same switches are omarchy toggle <thing>. Run omarchy toggle on its own to see the whole group.

The touchpad, touchscreen, and hybrid GPU switches live under Trigger > Hardware (Super + Ctrl + H) rather than under Toggle, since they only show up when you actually have that hardware. The touchpad and touchscreen ones survive a Hyprland reload — the disabled state is written back out as a small Lua file that Hyprland sources on startup.

The Toggle menu also carries a few things that aren’t omarchy toggle commands but behave the same: battery percentage in the bar, workspace layout (Super + L), window gaps (Super + Shift + Backspace), and the 1-window square aspect (Super + Ctrl + Backspace).

Most of these are just a flag file under ~/.local/state/omarchy/toggles/. If you want to branch on one in a script, omarchy-toggle-enabled gives you an exit code instead of making you go looking:

omarchy-toggle-enabled screensaver-off && echo "screensaver is off"

The flags are named for the off state — screensaver-off, suspend-off, bar-off — so their presence means the feature is disabled.

Indicators in the bar

When a mode is on, you get a small glyph in the middle of the top bar next to the clock. That’s the indicators widget, and it carries dictation, screen recording, pending reminders, night light, do not disturb, and stay awake.

Inactive indicators are hidden. Hover the area around them and they fade in dimmed, so you can click one to turn it on without knowing its hotkey. Clicking an active one turns it back off. If you’d rather see all of them all the time, set alwaysShow to true on the omarchy.indicators entry in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json — see the top bar for how bar widgets are configured.

Night light

Super + Ctrl + N warms the screen to 4000K, and hitting it again puts it back to 6500K. It’s driven by hyprsunset, which the toggle starts for you if it isn’t already running.

By default hyprsunset does nothing to your screen at all. ~/.config/hypr/hyprsunset.conf ships with an identity profile precisely so the display stays untouched until you ask for warmth. If you’d rather have it switch by the clock, replace that with a time profile:

profile {
    time = 20:00
    temperature = 4000
}

Then start hyprsunset at login by adding o.launch_on_start("hyprsunset") to ~/.config/hypr/autostart.lua. The 4000K/6500K pair used by the toggle is fixed, so the config file is where you go if you want a different temperature.

Do not disturb

Super + Ctrl + , silences notifications. No toasts pop up while it’s on, and the crossed-out bell indicator sits in the bar to remind you why the desktop has gone quiet.

Nothing is lost, though. A silenced notification is written straight into your notification history, which is exactly the record you want when you come back and wonder what you missed. Open it with Super + Shift + Alt + ,. See notices for the rest of the notification story.

Two kinds of message still get through: Omarchy’s own confirmation toasts for something you just did (“Theme changed”, “Screenshot saved”), and critical alerts sent from the command line. Chat apps that mark everything critical to force their way in front of you don’t qualify.

Idle

The Omarchy shell owns idle behavior, and the timings are a top-level idle block in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json:

{
  "version": 1,
  "idle": {
    "screensaver": 150,
    "lock": 300
  }
}

Both numbers are seconds counted from the moment you went idle — not from each other. So with the defaults, the screensaver comes up after two and a half minutes and the lock screen takes over at five minutes, whether or not the screensaver ran. Save the file and the shell picks up the new timings right away.

If you dismiss the screensaver before the lock deadline, that counts as activity and the pending lock is cancelled. You don’t get locked out for glancing at your machine.

To stop locking on idle entirely, Super + Ctrl + I — or omarchy toggle idle — flips stay awake on, and the coffee cup indicator appears in the bar. That’s the one to hit before a long presentation or a build you want to watch. Hit it again to go back to normal. omarchy toggle idle status prints the current state as JSON if you need it from a script.

This is about locking and the screensaver, not power. Suspend and hibernation have their own setup in system sleep.

The screensaver

Omarchy’s screensaver is ASCII art running through random text effects, one instance per monitor. Any key or mouse movement exits it.

You can start it on demand from System > Screensaver (Super + Esc), which forces it up even if you’ve turned the idle screensaver off. There’s no hotkey bound to it by default.

omarchy toggle screensaver is what turns the idle one off, if you’d rather go straight from working to locked. It needs a terminal it knows how to configure — Alacritty, Foot, Ghostty, or Kitty — and will tell you so if your default terminal is something else.

The logo it draws is yours to change, under Style > Screensaver. Upload a png or svg and Omarchy converts it to ASCII. See branding.

The lock screen

Super + Ctrl + L locks the machine. That runs the lock screen from the Omarchy shell, blanks the display, resets your keyboard layout to the first one so you’re not typing your password in the wrong alphabet, and — if you have it running — locks 1Password on the way out.

The lock screen takes a password, and it’ll take a fingerprint too once you’ve set one up. That, and the other ways to authenticate, are covered in hardware authentication.