Omarchy 4.5 RC2 is out with the F1 installer, and several shortcuts move
The second Omarchy 4.5 release candidate ships the much faster F1 installer, a shorter boot menu wait and a batch of reshuffled keybindings. Here’s what changed since RC1.
Image: Omarchy v4.5.0-rc2 release notes (GitHub)
Omarchy 4.5 has a second release candidate. Ryan Hughes published v4.5.0-rc2 as a GitHub prerelease late on October 27, 2026, a week after RC1. Two things stand out: the new F1 installer now ships in the ISO, and the notes open with a fresh “Breaking changes” section listing the shortcuts that moved. To try it on an existing machine, pick Update > Channel > RC, then Update > Omarchy. For new installs there’s an x86_64 ISO and an aarch64 ISO, with SHA256 checksums in the notes.
F1 is the headline. According to the release notes, the installer “unpacks a prebuilt root image and adds this machine’s packages on top, instead of installing about 940 packages one by one,” and Omarchy 4.5 now “installs in about half the time.” We covered how the prebuilt image works when it was merged; RC2 is the first release you can actually install with it. The official @omarchy account said on X the same evening, October 27, 2026, that it can “almost get a full installation down to the time of a pitstop on the fastest machines (current record is 6 seconds!!).” Ryan Hughes gave “major props” to @emirbeganovic for bringing it to life, and DHH quoted the announcement: “Should really have been three separate releases. But despite all of that, it’s slimmer, lighter, and WAY WAY FASTER TO INSTALL!”
The first breaking change is the boot menu. Limine now waits 1 second instead of about 6 and boots quietly, so most of the time you won’t see the menu at all. To reach it, keep tapping any key (the down arrow works) while the machine starts. If you want the menu up longer for good, set your own timeout: in /boot/limine.conf, for example timeout: 5. The notes say updates leave a timeout you set alone.
Then the shortcuts. Here’s what moved, according to the RC2 notes:
- Calculator:
Super + Ctrl + Qis nowSuper + Shift + Q. - Activity:
Super + Ctrl + Tis nowSuper + Shift + T, andSuper + Ctrl + Topens themes. - Network:
Super + Ctrl + Wis nowSuper + Ctrl + N, andSuper + Ctrl + Wopens backgrounds. - Nightlight no longer has a shortcut; it lives in
Trigger > Toggle. Super + Alt + Spaceopens Apps from the dock instead of the Apps menu.
Notifications get new keys too. Super + Comma now acts on the newest card, dismissing it, opening it or pressing its one button, instead of only dismissing it. Dismissing the last one moves to Super + Alt + Comma, silencing moves to Super + Ctrl + Alt + Comma, and Super + Ctrl + Comma hands you keyboard control of the cards. In a terminal, Super + C and Super + V now send Ctrl + Shift + C and Ctrl + Shift + V rather than Ctrl + Insert and Shift + Insert. And Super + Tab, its Shift and Ctrl variants, and Super + scroll now stay on the current monitor’s workspaces.
One change worth flagging for screenshot fans. RC1’s notes listed PR #8827 as “Take a screenshot with Super + Shift + S,” which is also what we reported on October 17, 2026. RC2’s notes list the same PR as “Take a screenshot with Super + Ctrl + Alt + C,” and put that combo among the new defaults that could collide with your own bindings. If you learned Super + Shift + S on RC1, check your muscle memory.
A few other things differ from RC1. Appearance is now a top-level menu, right before Trigger, and takes over the old Style menu, where RC1 had it under Trigger > Appearance. The notifications section no longer mentions snooze, in line with the trims merged on October 23, 2026. Jade Horse joins Starship as a default theme, the NVIDIA section now covers DGX Spark alongside N1x laptops, and the RC1 line about Kimi and Ori is replaced by “Add 11 more coding agents and track 23 agents and providers in the agents panel.”
RC2 also picks up fixes that RC1 testers may have hit: the Quattro upgrade no longer resets the default browser to Chromium (#15074), the laptop display comes back after unplugging an external one (#16310), Snapdragon laptop keyboards now type at the disk unlock prompt (#16688), installs work on the Lenovo Pro 9 with NVIDIA N1x (#16423), and hibernation works on unencrypted machines with more than one NVMe disk (#16658).
It’s still a release candidate, and the notes keep their warning to use a test machine or a backup you know how to roll back to. No date has been given for the final 4.5. If something breaks, the team asks for reports on GitHub.
Source: https://github.com/omacom/omarchy/releases/tag/v4.5.0-rc2
