Chris Hallas unveils ODK, a Rust and GPUI kit for Omarchy apps with sandboxed .oma bundles
A new community project pairs a themed Rust UI kit with a macOS-style app bundle format that installs and runs each app in its own sandbox. It is very early, but the ambition is big.
Image: Chris Hallas (X)
Building native apps for Omarchy just got a new foundation. On October 24, 2026, Chris Hallas introduced the ODK on X, short for “Omarchy Development Kit”, a project that “provides the foundational work for building high quality, consistent and beautiful applications for Omarchy.” He shared a ten-minute video walkthrough with it, warning that he recorded it “super quick” and that he is “not a content guy”.
The kit is “based on Rust and GPUI, moving away from Quickshell,” Hallas wrote. That is a design choice for his own kit: his posts say nothing about Omarchy’s own shell dropping Quickshell. The project lives on his personal GitHub account rather than under the omacom organization, and his X bio describes him as a volunteer at Omarchy.
The ODK repository on GitHub actually holds two projects. ODK itself lets you write Rust applications with a GPUI interface that follows your Omarchy theme, plus an embedded Luau machine for plugins, and apps depend on a single odk crate. Next to it sits OMA, the Omarchy Managed Application: a bundle format where an app is a directory named <App>.oma/, and an oma program that verifies, installs, sandboxes and starts it. According to the README, oma does not depend on ODK.
The bundle idea is the eye-catcher. Hallas compares it to macOS .app archives: a directory becomes “executable” and is “automatically sandboxed under a least privilege permissions model.” In other words, an app gets only the access it needs instead of free rein over your account.
The next day, October 25, he followed up to call the repository a “super early release” and said he is porting his own Quickshell app, Atmos, to ODK, which is “going well” so far. He listed the work still ahead: making the OS recognize .oma apps “so installation and consent is super smooth”, and eventually signed application bundles. Hallas said he sees this work as “a core piece of the larger Omarchy security model”, adding that he would “love to download plugins and apps that can’t just learn everything about me.”
Keep your expectations in check for now. The README describes the project as pre-release, with every crate at version 0.0.0, built on stable Rust (edition 2024) and targeting Linux x86_64 only, on Omarchy’s Arch, Hyprland and Wayland stack. The repository was created on October 19, 2026.
ODK is released under the MIT license, and contributors agree to a CLA when they send a pull request. Rust developers who want to try it can start with the examples/hello app and the design language docs, as the README suggests.
