New Omarchy installs open config files in Plain, Omacom’s own text editor
Ctrl+S saves, Ctrl+Z undoes, and saves never damage a file: Plain becomes the default editor on fresh Omarchy installs, while existing installs aren’t switched.
Image: omacom/plain README (GitHub)
Editing a Hyprland config on a fresh Omarchy install will soon stop meaning a trip into Neovim. DHH merged a pull request on November 10, 2026 that makes Plain the default editor for config and text files on new installs, coming in the next version. Neovim stays preinstalled.
Plain is brand new: its repository was created the same day and describes it as “Omarchy’s text editor for config files”. The README calls it “the editor you don’t have to learn”: Ctrl+S saves, Ctrl+Z undoes, Ctrl+F finds, and the window closes like any other. It follows the Omarchy theme, font, text size and language, and colors Lua, hyprlang/INI, TOML, JSON, YAML, shell and CSS with the theme’s own palette. Beyond that, it deliberately does nothing else: one window, one file, no tabs, plugins or projects.
The real pitch is safety. Because “a config file is read by a program that won’t forgive a surprise”, according to the README, Plain saves atomically through a temporary file and a rename, follows symlinks so linked configs stay linked, and keeps line endings, a UTF-8 byte-order mark and the final newline exactly as they were. Opening and saving without edits gives back the same bytes. It checks the file on disk right before every save and asks if something else changed it, and it refuses to open anything that isn’t valid UTF-8. Root-owned files open read-only, with sudoedit as the way to edit them.
According to the PR, on new installs plain joins the base packages, the packaged mimeapps.list opens text types in Plain instead of Neovim, and the editor commands fall back to Plain when no editor has been chosen, so the config entries in the Omarchy menu and $EDITOR open it. Setup > Default > Editor now lists Plain first, and picking it on a machine without it installs the package.
It works in the terminal flow too. For inline uses such as git commit, sudoedit or crontab, Plain runs in place and waits until its window closes. Without a display, over SSH or on a TTY, the launcher falls back to vi, which every install already has.
Existing installs aren’t switched over. A migration saves nvim as the editor when none was chosen, and adds nvim.desktop to ~/.config/mimeapps.list for every text type the user hasn’t set themselves. An explicit editor choice and personal file associations are left alone. Anyone who wants to try Plain can pick it in Setup > Default > Editor.
Plain is written in C++ and Qt Quick under the MIT license. Its omarchy-pkgs package, merged on November 10, builds for x86_64 and aarch64, needs only Qt 6 and xdg-desktop-portal (syntax highlighting is built in), and follows Plain’s GitHub releases automatically. Plain 0.2.0 was released later the same day; its release notes list much faster typing in long files and safer saving.
Plain arrives alongside Files, another in-house app, which replaces Nautilus as Omarchy’s file manager in the next version.
