Omaglow

Animated Omarchy-colored glow for your focused window.

Omaglow gives the active window a thin cyan, blue, and purple gradient border with a restrained inner glow. Hyprland renders and animates the effect itself. There is no overlay window, focus watcher, or polling process.

Preview

Illustrative concept render, not a captured desktop screenshot. The exact glow depends on Hyprland, display scale, refresh rate, and the configured colors.

What works

• Hyprland owns focus selection, geometry, clipping, and rendering.
• The effect follows tiled and floating windows without an external tracker.
• Focus changes use Hyprland's existing active and inactive decoration states.
• A configreloaded event reapplies the runtime settings after a Hyprland reload.
• Disabling the service reloads the user's Lua configuration to restore prior decoration settings.

Requirements

This prototype targets Omarchy 4.0.1 with Hyprland 0.56.2 and Quickshell 0.3.1. It uses APIs added to the current Hyprland configuration model: decoration.glow, borderangle, and glowangle.

It does not claim support for Omarchy 3, Hyprland 0.54 or earlier, other compositors, or Hyprland builds without the glow options.

Install

Install from GitHub with Omarchy 4's supported command:

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/omas-best/omaglow.git --enable

For this local checkout:

mkdir -p ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/community.omaglow
cp -a ./. ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/community.omaglow/
omarchy plugin validate ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/community.omaglow
omarchy-shell shell rescanPlugins
omarchy plugin enable community.omaglow

The service applies its defaults when Omarchy Shell loads it. No root access or additional package is needed. See installation and removal for the development-copy workflow, updates, and uninstall behavior.

Configure

Copy the documented defaults, edit the copy, then apply it:

mkdir -p ~/.config/omaglow
cp ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/community.omaglow/config/default.conf \
  ~/.config/omaglow/config.conf
${HOME}/.config/omarchy/plugins/community.omaglow/scripts/omaglowctl apply

The available settings are enabled, colors, speed, intensity, radius, border_size, and opacity. See configuration for valid ranges and examples.

How it is built

The Omarchy service runs one control command when it loads and again after a real Hyprland config reload. The command sends one hyprctl --batch request containing documented Lua hl.config and hl.animation calls. Continuous movement comes from Hyprland's loop angle animation; Omaglow does not run a timer or poll window state.

This is deliberately a native compositor effect. It is smaller and less fragile than a C++ Hyprland plugin. The compromise is visible: Hyprland 0.56 calls its native effect an inner glow. Omaglow cannot produce a wide blurred outer halo without moving to a compositor plugin or an input-transparent overlay.

Read the full architecture decision, including the alternatives and rendering cost.

Verify and develop

./tests/test_omaglowctl.sh
./scripts/omaglowctl check

The automated tests cover configuration validation, alpha and duration conversion, one-batch application, and reset behavior with a fake hyprctl. They do not prove visual output or compositor compatibility. See development for the manual matrix that still needs real Omarchy hardware.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.