moarchy

Omarchy's look, keybindings and theming on a phone — a Google Pixel 3a — running on Arch Linux ARM with Sway in Hyprland's place.

This is not a fork of Omarchy's installer. It is a thin overlay that vendors Omarchy's configuration and theme layer — which is architecture-neutral — onto an aarch64 base, and replaces the one part that cannot work on this hardware.

Install

Download the image for your phone from Releases. There is no installer to run on the device and no default password to change: the account's password is locked and tty1 autologin brings the session up without one.

The bootloader must be unlocked. Unpack the sargo archive, put the phone in fastboot (power off, hold Volume Down, tap Power), and run flash.sh. That overwrites boot and userdata; the Android install does not survive it.

tar -xJf moarchy-sargo-*.tar.xz
cd moarchy-sargo-*
./flash.sh

Why not just run Omarchy?

Two hard blockers, both verified rather than assumed.

1. Omarchy's package repo is x86_64-only.

https://pkgs.omarchy.org/stable/x86_64/omarchy.db  ->  200  (211 packages)
https://pkgs.omarchy.org/stable/aarch64/omarchy.db ->  404

install/preflight/guard.sh upstream also requires x86_64, limine, a btrfs root and vanilla-Arch markers — none of which hold on a phone.

2. There is no packaged device stack. No pacman repo anywhere carries an SDM670 kernel or the Pixel 3a's firmware, so moarchy builds and publishes both, at pins (docs/devices.md §2).

What ports cleanly, and why

Omarchy 4.x generates its per-app theming from one small file per theme, colors.toml, expanded through default/themed/*.tpl by omarchy-theme-set-templates. The Hyprland template (hyprland.lua.tpl) is 18 lines — it sets window and group border colours and nothing else.

So the entire theme system ports by adding one file: default/themed/sway.conf.tpl. All 22 upstream themes then work on Sway with no per-theme effort, and shell.toml.tpl — which themes the whole quickshell shell — along with foot.ini.tpl and btop.theme.tpl, are reused untouched. (alacritty.toml.tpl is reused untouched too, and has been unused here since the phone went down to one terminal on 2026-09-08 — see docs/apps.md.)

Better still, that template engine already processes a user template directory (~/.config/omarchy/themed) ahead of its own built-ins — so moarchy adds Sway theming without patching the vendored upstream at all.

What runs on it

docs/apps.md — every app the phone ships with, what each one is, and screenshots straight off the device for the ones that have been run on it. Short version: GNOME's libadwaita apps and KDE's Kirigami/Plasma Mobile apps both reflow to a 360px screen and are the comfortable fit; availability is not the constraint, screen width is.

What it looks like

docs/style.md is the style contract — the type scale, the six colour roles, the four radii, the 44px touch-target floor and the motion budget. It binds the shell plugins in this repo and the two surfaces that are not in it: the keyboard and the store. Three programs, three toolkits — quickshell/QML, standalone Qt, Python and GTK4 — one palette, read from the theme omarchy-theme-set stages at ~/.local/state/omarchy/current/theme/.

scripts/style-check.sh enforces the half of it that is visible in the source.

How this was built

docs/build-log.md is the chronological account — every measurement, and every dead end, including the ones that cost the most time (RNDIS vs macOS, a write-protected SD adapter, Docker Desktop's missing Landlock, and an assumption about Omarchy 4.x that turned out to be wrong twice over).

Omarchy 4.x

moarchy runs Omarchy v4.0.4 (c668141), pinned in manifest.toml. There is no waybar, walker, mako or swayosd in the package set: in 4.x the bar, launcher, notifications and OSD are one quickshell/QML shell, and the phone UI is a set of plugins on top of it rather than a patched copy of it.

An earlier port targeted v3.8.4 (8fcc9d6) — waybar, walker, mako and swayosd — on the reading that v4.0.0 had moved to herdr, a bespoke shell shipped only as an x86_64 binary. That reading was wrong twice over: herdr is neither the shell nor closed source. docs/omarchy-4x-feasibility.md is the correction. The 3.8.4 port is gone; it exists only in git history.

Why 4.x is portable. The shell is quickshell/QML — architecture-neutral, and quickshell builds for aarch64. What is left is Hyprland coupling in five QML files, and pkgbuilds/omarchy-config/port-4x.patch translates those mechanically: Quickshell.Hyprland becomes Quickshell.I3, which speaks Sway's IPC. The one genuine gap is HyprlandFocusGrab, which has no I3 counterpart, so vendored popups lose click-outside-to-dismiss.

Touch gestures

Sway's bindgesture only fires for touchpads, so the gestures are a Quickshell plugin that owns the bottom edge as a layer surface and reads the touch itself. Everything follows the finger rather than firing at a threshold.

One drag up from the home pill has two stops, the way Android's does:

0 -------------- 50% -------------- 100% -- past the top
    closes             opens                   HOME

Gesture	What it does
Swipe up from the pill, short	The app drawer
Swipe up from the pill, further	Home — a workspace with nothing on it
Swipe up on the wallpaper	The app drawer, tracking the finger 1:1
Press and hold the pill	The default coding agent, in a terminal — the picker, with none chosen yet
Swipe left / right	Next / previous workspace, which is next / previous app
Swipe in from the right edge	The workspace overview — every workspace as a card, one under the other
Tap an app on a card	Switch to that app
Drag an app off its card	Move it to another workspace — two on one workspace tile, one above the other — or into the bin to close it
Pull down from the status bar	The control center: quick settings, brightness, media

Every up-swipe raises the app drawer — over an app, over a home screen, over nothing (docs/gestures.md A5). The app drawer is a launcher and nothing else: what is already running is the workspace overview's subject, and one surface answers "where is everything" rather than two that show the same windows in two shapes. Nothing on the strip closes a window either: apps are closed by dragging them into the workspace overview's bin, one at a time (C4, P12).

The two vertical edges are one gesture each, and the right one is the map. A swipe in from it pulls the workspace overview across: every workspace as a card, one under the other, each showing the windows on it. Tap a card to go there, tap an app to go straight to it, or drag an app onto another card to move it — which is the one way a workspace comes to hold two. Drag it into the bin at the foot of the sheet and it closes, which is the one place a window is closed by hand.

Two windows side by side on a 360px screen get 180px each, which nothing here can use — so a workspace that holds more than one is split vertically, one above the other, at 370px each. bin/moarchy-one-app-per-workspace does that on sway's own event stream, so a keyboard user's $mod+Shift+2 lands the same way as the drag. Launching an app still gives it a workspace of its own — sharing one is something you ask for, once, by dragging.

The hold is the other gesture Android spends on what its owner reaches for most. Here that is the coding agent, and the pill shakes while the press counts down — a 4px line under a motionless thumb otherwise looks exactly like a 4px line under a thumb that is only resting, and a gesture nobody can see happening is a gesture nobody finds (C1, C2).

Everything is reachable without a finger, which is how the selftest asserts it:

omarchy-shell workspace-overview windows      # one line per open window
omarchy-shell gestures swipe home
moarchy-selftest --gestures   # drives real synthetic touch via /dev/uinput

Layout

Ten files worth knowing about. For the whole map — the eleven shell plugins and what each owns, how the screens stack, where a given change goes, and what to run — see docs/README.md § The code.

Path	What it is
default/omarchy/plugins/	The phone UI: thirteen quickshell plugins and the shared code under moarchy.common/
manifest.toml	The version pins. The only file that says what version of anything is built
pkgbuilds/	moarchy, omarchy-config (upstream + the Sway port as a patch), moarchy-meta, moarchy-keyring
pkgbuilds/moarchy-meta/PKGBUILD	The aarch64 package set, as depends, with every omission explained
default/sway/bindings.conf	Omarchy's bindings, translated to Sway, key-for-key
pkgbuilds/moarchy-device-sargo/sway.conf	1080×2220 @ scale 3, touch, no gaps, the power key
default/themed/sway.conf.tpl	The one file that themes Sway from any Omarchy theme
bin/moarchy-*	Sway counterparts to Omarchy's Hyprland helpers
bin/omarchy-*	Shims with upstream's names, so omarchy-menu keeps working
docker/	aarch64 container that builds every package natively on Apple Silicon
image/boot/android-bootimg.sh	The boot backend: mkbootimg, AVB, the sparse rootfs

Updating

The image ships the [moarchy] repository, so everything updates with one command — the kernel, firmware and modem stack from [moarchy] itself, and the phone UI from moarchy:

sudo pacman -Syu

The database and every package are signed, and pacman.conf says SigLevel = Required, so an unsigned or altered package is refused rather than installed as root.

Shell files land immediately but the running shell keeps the old code until it restarts — a pacman hook says so after an upgrade:

moarchy-restart-shell     # or reboot

_{Adding the repo to a phone that predates it, or to a stock DanctNIX install, needs the key first — moarchy-keyring is itself signed, so pacman will not install it without already trusting the key:}

S=https://github.com/SimonSchubert/moarchy/releases/download/repo
curl -fsSLO $S/moarchy.asc
sudo pacman-key --init
sudo pacman-key --add moarchy.asc
sudo pacman-key --lsign-key 3CA83612E7F3108F442006B418305B893569BAD3
printf '\n[moarchy]\nSigLevel = Required\nServer = %s\n' "$S" | sudo tee -a /etc/pacman.conf
sudo pacman -Syu moarchy-meta

Reflashing is still needed for changes to the partition layout, to what runs on first boot, or to the u-boot SPL — that lives outside any partition, at byte 131072.

Building it yourself

./scripts/provision.sh build      # the packages, in an aarch64 container
./scripts/build-image.sh          # -> images/moarchy-sargo-<version>-<date>/
./scripts/verify-image.sh         # 93 checks against the image just built

Everything comes from the commits pinned in manifest.toml, so two runs a month apart produce the same image. The package build produces the components (moarchy-keyboard, moarchy-store-git, moarchy-keep, moarchy-vitals), the AUR rebuilds (yay, xdg-terminal-exec, ttf-ia-writer, cbonsai, lcl-gui-bin, mise-bin), and pkgbuilds/ (moarchy, omarchy-config, moarchy-meta, moarchy-keyring, and a moarchy-device-* per phone).

For a debug image that joins your wifi on first boot and enables sshd:

WIFI_SSID='MyNetwork' WIFI_PSK='secret' \
  MOARCHY_SSH_KEY=~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub ./scripts/build-image.sh

Both are optional and both mark the image as a debug build. MOARCHY_SSH_KEY authorises that key for the phone's account and enables sshd, which saves the round trip through the card that a reflash otherwise costs — the account has no password, so there is no other way back in.

Do not publish either. The PSK is a secret; the key is not, but an authorized_keys in a public image would have every phone that flashes it trust one person's key. ./scripts/verify-image.sh fails an image carrying either.

Getting back in after a reflash

A reflash wipes /home/moarchy/.ssh, and the account has no password, so a published image locks you out of your own phone until a key is authorised again. Rather than pulling the SD card, type one line on the phone:

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SimonSchubert/moarchy/main/scripts/authorize-ssh.sh | sh -s <github-user>

That authorises every public key on https://github.com/<github-user>.keys, enables sshd, and prints the phone's address and host-key fingerprint. The username is required and has no default, for the same reason a published image carries no authorized_keys.

Developing against a phone you already have

./scripts/provision.sh build
./scripts/provision.sh deploy     # scp the packages over
./scripts/provision.sh install    # one pacman transaction

What you get, and what you don't

Kept: Omarchy's keybindings, all 22 themes with live switching, the whole quickshell shell — bar, launcher, notifications, OSD — the omarchy-menu system, and the themed terminal/btop/fastfetch/starship stack.

Gone, because they are Hyprland renderer features that a GLES 2.0 device could never have driven: blur, shadows, rounded corners, animations, gradient borders, hyprlock (replaced with a themed swaylock).

Also dropped: universal copy/paste (Hyprland sendshortcut has no Sway equivalent), OCR capture (tesseract has no aarch64 build), dictation (voxtype is x86-only), and every x86-only proprietary app — 1Password, Spotify, Obsidian, Typora. See the bottom of pkgbuilds/moarchy-meta/PKGBUILD for the full list with reasons.

Measured on the device

Numbers from a real Pixel 3a (SDM670, 4 GB), not estimates:

GPU	Adreno 615 on freedreno — GLES 3.2 and Vulkan
Panel	1080x2220, scale 3 -> 360x740 logical
Storage	rootfs in userdata, grown on first boot
btop minimum	60 columns, regardless of shown_boxes

That last row is why moarchy-launch-tui drops TUIs to font size 7 (~60 columns): at Omarchy's desktop font size, btop simply refuses to draw on this screen. The window is a normal tiled one — the bar and the keyboard anchor to opposite edges, so neither costs a column, and a fullscreened terminal would only hide the keyboard.

Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, sound, camera, vibration, NFC, calls with voice on them and SMS in both directions are all measured on the handset rather than reported; docs/devices.md D27–D34 is the evidence.

Known limitations

• Telephony has only been tried on an operator with circuit-switched fallback. A VoLTE-only network needs an IMS stack that is not here yet — docs/devices.md §10.
• The camera's colour profile is matrix-only — no HueSatMap and no look table, so colour is correct rather than pleasing.

Out of scope for now

Video recording (Megapixels' path wants GStreamer plugins nothing declares), power tuning beyond the idle/blank path, and rotation sensor handling — the control center's Rotate tile is manual.

The camera, telephony, suspend, the package repository and the on-screen keyboard were all on this list and are not any more. The camera entry here read "VIDIOC_STREAMON fails on both sensors" until 2026-09-06, and that was never the problem: nothing was configuring the media graph, which is what libmegapixels does. See docs/apps.md.