Omarchy 4.5’s Quake-style console drops a terminal over the desktop on Super + Grave
Shopify’s Tobias Lütke started it, and three more pull requests shaped it into a centered, dimmed panel that comes with your default coding agent. Here’s how the console in Omarchy 4.5 RC3 works.
Image: omacom/omarchy PR #7409 (GitHub)
Omarchy 4.5 has a new key to learn, and it’s the one just below Esc. According to the notes for the third release candidate, published on November 2, 2026, “Super + Grave drops a centered, dimmed terminal console over the desktop, a handy home for a terminal agent.” Super + Shift + Grave sends the window you’re on into it, and the full-size scratchpad stays on its own on Super + S. The console is in the RC now, and for everyone on the stable channel it’s coming in the next version.
It started with a pull request from Shopify’s Tobias Lütke, the same @tobi behind Disktree. Opened by Lütke and merged by DHH into the quattro branch the same day, August 18, 2026, it gave the scratchpad a Quake-style presentation: an inset, dimmed overlay with rounded corners, shadow, blur and directional slide animations. It added the two grave shortcuts next to the existing scratchpad bindings and documented the scratchpad as “a quick home for terminal agents.”
The agent part came less than an hour later. A follow-up by omarchybot, also merged by DHH on August 18, 2026, gathered everything into a single qconsole.lua file and seeded the console with omarchy-agent. According to the PR, the agent starts the first time the console drops down rather than at boot, and comes back on the next open if you close it. Omarchy doesn’t pick a default agent for you, though, so until you set one the console simply opens empty.
The same PR made the console half the screen at any monitor scale. A window rule would freeze its size when the window first maps, so the console is sized by the gaps left around it instead, recalculated whenever the monitor layout changes. Then a PR by ogarza, merged on September 13, 2026, turned it into a centered panel twice as wide as it is tall. A second tiled app gets the full width back, while a floating window on top, like btop, doesn’t count. According to the PR, it sizes itself to the monitor it opens on, and rotated screens don’t end up with a sliver.
The last of these changes to make it into RC3 split the two apart. In mwikala’s PR, merged by Ryan Hughes on October 25, 2026, the scratchpad and the console become two separate special workspaces: scratchpad keeps its full size and its windows on Super + S, while qconsole is the half-height console on Super + Grave, with the Quake styling and the agent seed scoped to it. That’s the form the RC3 notes describe, and the manual in RC3 puts it simply: “It opens with your default agent ready to go.”
Already using the grave key for something else? The RC3 notes list Super + Grave and Super + Shift + Grave among the new defaults “that could collide with bindings of your own.” Norwegian keyboards have the opposite problem: the key below Esc produces | there, and an open PR by stappmus would add Super + | and Super + Shift + | when Norwegian is the primary layout. It hasn’t been merged yet.
The console keeps evolving after RC3. On November 3, 2026, DHH merged a change into quattro that seeds it with the agent picker when no default agent is set, so it no longer opens empty with no explanation. If a local model is running, the console prefers it, using the last one started. And when an agent picked from the console needs installing first, it installs in a floating terminal and then opens tiled in the console. This one landed after RC3 was cut, so it’s coming in a later version, and it isn’t confirmed for 4.5 final yet.
Laptop users will get another way in. The default touchpad gestures we covered on October 29, 2026 map a three-finger swipe up to the same console. They were merged into quattro on October 28, 2026, but they aren’t in RC3. Until then, hit Super + Grave and let your agent drop in.
