rdt

Your Reddit feed in the Omarchy bar. An unread count on the pill; the posts and their comments in the popup.

No API key, no OAuth app, no configuration: the plugin reads the Reddit session from whichever Chromium-family browser you are already signed in to.

Your feeds	A post and its comments	Finding a subreddit

Pinned subreddits become tabs. Posts carry their thumbnail, score, comment count and age; a post you have opened dims, and one you upvoted takes the accent. Opening a post renders its Markdown, its pictures and its comment tree, with each commenter's avatar resolved for the whole thread in a single request.

Requirements

Everything it needs ships with Omarchy already:

• python3 (used at /usr/bin/python3)
• curl
• openssl
• secret-tool (libsecret)
• A Chromium-family browser signed in to Reddit: Chromium, Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi or Edge
• An unlocked keyring (gnome-keyring or kwallet)

No Python packages are installed and none are needed.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/leonrlr4/rdt.git --enable

Or, from a local checkout:

cp -r . ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/leonrlr4.rdt
omarchy plugin enable leonrlr4.rdt right

Check it can see your session:

~/.config/omarchy/plugins/leonrlr4.rdt/bin/reddit-fetch doctor

That prints which browsers were found, whether the keyring could be read, which Reddit cookies exist and how many hours the access token has left. It never prints a cookie or a token.

Use

Action	Result
Left click the pill	Open the feed
Right click the pill	Refresh now
Click a post	Read it, with comments, in the panel
Click a subreddit name	Switch to its tab if it is one, otherwise browse it
Click 🔍, or press /	Search for a subreddit by name
Click ☆ while browsing	Pin it as a tab; ★ unpins
Hover a tab, click ×	Unpin it
Middle click a post	Open it in the browser and mark it read
↑ ↓	Move the cursor through posts; scroll while reading a post
← →	Switch feed tab
Enter	Open the post under the cursor
Esc	Back out one level: post, search, subreddit, then close
r	Refresh
a	Mark everything read
Click "N new"	Mark everything read

It can also be driven from a keybinding or a script:

omarchy-shell leonrlr4.rdt toggle
omarchy-shell leonrlr4.rdt refresh
omarchy-shell leonrlr4.rdt markAllRead

Settings

Configure in the bar's widget settings, or with omarchy bar set:

omarchy bar set leonrlr4.rdt feeds "best,r/omarchy,r/linux"

Key	Default	Meaning
feeds	best	Comma separated. best is your subscribed front page; anything else is a subreddit, with or without the r/ prefix. Each name becomes a tab. The ☆ and × in the panel edit this for you.
refreshMinutes	0	0 fetches only when you open the panel. Any value of 2 or more also refreshes in the background, keeping the unread count live between opens.
limit	25	Posts fetched per feed.
browser	(empty)	Force a browser instead of auto-detecting: chromium, chrome, brave, vivaldi, edge.
hideWhenRead	false	Hide the pill entirely when nothing is unread.
showImages	true	Thumbnails in the list and the post's picture in the reading view. Reddit's downscaled renditions, never the full-size original.

When it fetches

By default the plugin does not poll. It fetches once shortly after the shell starts, so the pill carries a real count, and then only when you open the panel — opening twice within 30 seconds reuses the first result rather than spending a second request. Comments are fetched only when you open a post.

Reddit allows 100 requests per 10 minutes on this path, and one fetch spends one request per feed, so on-demand use is nowhere near the limit. Setting refreshMinutes trades some of that budget for an unread count that stays live while the panel is closed: three feeds polled every 5 minutes uses 6%.

What the panel draws

Posts are rendered as Reddit writes them. Selftext and comments are CommonMark and Qt renders them as such, so bold, italics, lists, quotes, code and links arrive as formatting rather than as punctuation. Reddit ends a line wherever the author pressed enter, which CommonMark would fold into a space, so single newlines are converted to hard breaks before rendering — otherwise a comment written as five short lines arrives as one run-on paragraph.

Pictures use Reddit's own published renditions: the 140px square crop for a list row, and the smallest rendition at least 640px wide for the reading view. The url on an image post is the full-resolution original — routinely over a megabyte — which is far more than a panel needs to draw a 400px-wide picture.

Gallery posts need the reading view. They carry no preview at all; their pictures live in gallery_data paired with media_metadata, and the listing endpoints strip both, so a gallery has no list thumbnail and all of its images once opened. Reddit-hosted video is a DASH stream the panel cannot play, so its frame is marked with a play badge and clicking it opens the browser.

Inline media in comments is drawn too. Reddit writes a comment GIF as ![gif](giphy|ID) — an id, not a URL — so a Markdown renderer draws a broken-image icon where the GIF should be. Those embeds are lifted out of the text before rendering and drawn as real animated images at a width the panel chooses, using Giphy's 200px rendition. Subreddit emotes have no stable public URL and are dropped rather than drawn as placeholders.

Colour carries meaning rather than decoration: the subreddit, the score, the author and the timestamp each take a different role from the theme, and a post you have already opened keeps its title at the weight of secondary text. The panel opens at 80% of the display height, clamped to whatever the bar leaves.

Tabs and browsing

Escape or the back arrow pops one level at a time:

tabs  →  a subreddit (clicked or searched)  →  a post and its comments

Clicking a subreddit name reaches only what is already in your feed, and if it is already a tab it simply switches to that tab rather than opening a second view of it. Search reaches everything else: /subreddits/search, one request per settled query rather than one per keystroke, so typing "neovim" costs one. It searches rather than autocompletes on purpose — "neovim" also turns up r/vim and r/unixporn, which is the point of looking for a subreddit you cannot already name.

Opening a subreddit does not add a tab, because looking is not the same as keeping. The star in the header is what turns one into the other, and it writes the feeds setting — so a pinned tab survives a restart. Hovering a tab reveals an × that unpins it; unpinning the last one leaves the front page rather than an empty panel.

Pinning writes shell.json, which makes the shell reload. That is the same path the first-party clock uses to remember a cycled format, and it is fine here for the same reason: it happens when you click a star, not on a timer. The rule it does not break is the one about read state, which changes every poll and so lives in a cache file instead.

How authentication works

bin/reddit-fetch reads two cookies out of the browser's cookie store, decrypting them with the browser's "Safe Storage" key from your keyring, and uses whichever is usable:

1. token_v2 as a Bearer token against oauth.reddit.com. This is the OAuth access token Reddit's own web client uses. It lives 24 hours and the browser renews it while you browse. Its expiry is read locally out of the JWT, so a stale token is detected without spending a request.
2. reddit_session as a cookie against www.reddit.com/*.json, used when the token is stale. This cookie lives about six months, so the plugin keeps working through weeks of not opening Reddit in the browser. That path also needs the headers a browser would send — Accept, Referer and the Sec-Fetch-* set. Reddit answers the cookie alone with 403 and an HTML error page, and the same request with those headers with 200 and JSON.

Anonymous access is not a fallback: www.reddit.com/*.json answers 403 without auth, and the anonymous .rss feed is capped at one request per 60 seconds, which is far too tight to drive a bar widget.

What this means for you

• Nothing is written to disk, and nothing reaches the process list. Cookies live in the memory of a process that runs for about a second per fetch, and the headers carrying them are passed to curl on stdin rather than in argv, where /proc/<pid>/cmdline would expose them to every process on the machine. doctor is careful never to print them.
• Read only. The plugin issues GETs. It never votes, comments, saves or posts.
• It is not the official API. Driving reddit.com with a browser session rather than a registered OAuth app is against Reddit's terms of use. Fetching only when you open the panel puts the traffic far below normal browsing, but the risk to your account is not zero. Decide for yourself.
• Unsandboxed. Like every Omarchy plugin, this runs inside the shell process with your user's permissions.

Boundaries

Things this plugin deliberately does not do, and the checks that keep it that way. Each has tests.

• Credentials never reach argv. Headers go to curl over stdin via --config -.
• Nothing built from a URL reaches a shell. Opening a link uses an argv vector, and the URL must be absolute https with no control characters or spaces before it is passed at all.
• Images load only from Reddit's own media hosts. An allowlist, applied when the response is normalized and again in QML before an Image is given a source, since an image source is a request the shell makes on its own.
• Reddit text is never markup. Titles, names and metadata render as plain text; post bodies and comments render as Markdown, with their inline media lifted out and drawn as bounded images rather than fetched by the renderer.
• Responses and fields are bounded before parsing and after: a size cap on the response, and caps on how many posts, comments, media items and search results — and how long a title or body — can cross into the panel.
• The read-state cache cannot be redirected. Opened with O_NOFOLLOW, checked to be a regular file this user owns, written 0600 to a fresh file and renamed into place.

Read state

Which posts you have already seen is a cache, kept at ~/.cache/rdt/seen.json — deliberately not in shell.json, which the shell hot-reloads whenever it is written. The newest 500 ids are kept.

Delete that file to mark everything unread again.

Troubleshooting

Run bin/reddit-fetch doctor first. The pill also shows a short code, and the panel shows the full message.

Pill	Cause
no browser	No Chromium-family profile found.
log in	Browser found, but it holds no Reddit session.
keyring	The keyring is locked, so the cookie key cannot be read.
session	Reddit rejected the session. Open Reddit in the browser again.
offline	Could not reach Reddit.
throttled	Rate limited; the next poll backs off.

A failed fetch never blanks the feed: whatever was last fetched stays on screen under the error.

Development

/usr/bin/python3 tests/test_fetch.py                          # 135 checks
/usr/lib/qt6/bin/qml -platform offscreen tests/test_model.qml  # 34 checks
omarchy plugin validate .

test_fetch.py is stdlib unittest and touches neither the network nor the real cookie store. test_model.qml covers the feed-list logic that has to run inside the panel; it reports only through its exit code, because the qml runtime under -platform offscreen prints nothing at all.

Saving any file under ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/ hot-reloads the plugin — but only its entry point. Panel.qml is pulled in by a Loader, and the running shell keeps serving the previous build of it from its component cache: the journal says it reloaded, the file on disk is plainly different, and the panel still paints the old version, with no error anywhere. Changes below BarWidget.qml need a full restart:

rm -rf ~/.cache/quickshell/qmlcache && omarchy restart shell

A screenshot taken after a hot reload is not evidence that a Panel.qml change works.

Static checks against the shell's own imports need a qs alias pointing at the shell root:

mkdir -p /tmp/qmlroot && ln -sfn /usr/share/omarchy/shell /tmp/qmlroot/qs
qmllint -I /tmp/qmlroot -I /usr/lib/qt6/qml BarWidget.qml Panel.qml

Colours and type

Nothing in the QML is a literal colour or a hand-picked pixel size. Colours are bindings onto Color.popups.*, so a theme switch repaints the panel; secondary text is that surface's own text at reduced alpha rather than Color.muted, because muted falls back to color8 when a theme omits it, which lands near the background on dark themes. Sizes come from Style.font.caption / bodySmall / body / subtitle, never from arithmetic on body — multiplying it produces sizes below the shell's own smallest token and ignores per-token overrides, which is how this panel first shipped with 8px comment bylines.

missing-property and unqualified warnings are expected — the shell's Style and Color singletons are QtObject groups that qmllint cannot resolve statically, and first-party widgets produce the same ones. Two signal-handler-parameters warnings on Process.onExited are also expected: the signal's second parameter is a C++ enum with no QML type.

Remove

omarchy plugin remove leonrlr4.rdt
rm -rf ~/.cache/rdt

License

MIT. See LICENSE.