Setting default terminal doesn't work as I expected

[tomasnorre]

What do you need?

Hi,

When setting the default terminal from alacritty to kitty. I would expect all the installs, remove etc. to run in kitty instead.

But if I do the following:

1. install kitty
2. change default terminal to kitty
3. remove alacritty
4. want to install a package, nothing happens, it still expects alacritty for that.

I would expect that the default terminal would kick in all time when a terminal was needed.

I would love to have a slim version of my system and only have installed absolutely what I need, and I would not need two terminals. ;)

lol, i just tried it and you're right, didn't actually uninstall alacritty when I installed ghostty

i imagine the following all need to be changed to $TERMINAL variables in the repo, but for now if you want a workaround (that saves 8mb of alacritty lmao)

go to ~/.local/share/omarchy/bin

nvim omarchy-menu

line 40, change to your preferred terminal (you said kitty)

then nvim omarchy-launch-floating-terminal-with-presentation should be obvious what to change in there, it's like 5 lines

then go into nvim omarchy-launch-about and change the terminal and potentially remove the font size (it threw an error as unsupported flags on ghostty)

you will probably break the floating function, your presentation terminals will tile as them being floating relies (presumably) on the window class being passed as omarchy, which ghostty didn't support.

I may have missed a couple of alacritty's but you get the idea if you really only want one terminal all the codes in there

(p.s. whoever wrote these menu's in straight bash is f****** awesome lol)

[wekauwau]

Honestly, I’m fine with Alacritty still being used even though the default terminal has been changed.

1. It’s mostly just used to run Omarchy commands (like pkg-install, launch-about, etc.), and it closes afterward. I don’t really interact with it much.
2. Having Alacritty installed doesn’t really bloat your system.
3. Maybe there’s a reason the maintainers decided to keep it that way.

Oh yeah, same. I just did this one as a tech exercise to dig in and learn more about the omarchy menu lol. I didn't even think to uninstall alacritty on my system till I saw this issue.

Fwiw, I think the reason is Alacritty allows passing custom window classes as arguments, and window classes are used by hyprctl to decide how to spawn a window. It's how you can make picture in picture always appear in the same place, floating, on all desktops above all windows. You set the window class to those settings in your hyprland config and it spawns the window that way instead of the default, tiled view. This is used in the menu views to make an omarchy presentation terminal function, and for it to be floating and centered without making every terminal like that, because the function passes alacritty a special window class. This didn't seem to work when I switched it to ghostty, which would break the nice presentation of the update terminals...

Excuse the nerding out just thought I'd share my theory on point three.

[tomasnorre]

I just like a tidy system, there is a lot in the default omarchy install that I remove after my installation.

[wekauwau]

Well, just take a look at ~/.local/share/omarchy/ so you can understand how Omarchy works and avoid running into anything "unexpected" again.

[tomasnorre]

If Omarchy doesn't work without Alacritty, it shouldn't be possible to uninstalled it without a warning.

[wekauwau]

At least the manual is always available to read.