Omarchy’s bar is getting a true center box and much smoother dragging
A big rework of the Omarchy Shell bar replaces centerAnchor with a real center box, keeps widgets alive while you rearrange them, and fixes which way the tray and indicators grow.
Image: omacom/omarchy PR #15517 (GitHub)
The Omarchy bar just got its biggest rework in a while. outfoxxed, Head of Omarchy Shell, merged “Rework bar dragging, sections and widget orientation” into the quattro branch on October 15, 2026. It touches 38 files, with Bar.qml alone at +1002/-527 lines, and it’s coming in the next version of Omarchy.
The headline change is the middle of the bar. In the PR’s words, it “splits center + centerAnchor into a center box and begin/end regions around it”. The old centerAnchor setting, which pinned one widget to the exact center with the others flanking it, is gone. Instead, bar.layout now has five sections: left, centerBegin, center, centerEnd and right (plus tray for the tray’s drawer). Everything in center is centered as one group, and centerBegin and centerEnd hang off its edges. The new default puts the indicators in centerBegin, the clock alone in center, and Elsewhen and friends in centerEnd, so the clock stays dead center as the weather and update badge come and go.
Dragging gets a lot nicer too. The PR promises it “significantly improves drag ux”, and the updated manual spells out what that means: while you drag a widget, the others slide apart to make room where it will land. The center box shows up as an outline (or a line across the bar when it’s empty), you can drop into it or beside it, and it grows to take the widget in when a drop would land there.
Under the hood, the bar “stops recreating widgets on rearrange”. According to the updated shell docs, a widget now keeps running when it moves to another section, whether you drag it or a config write moves it. It’s only rebuilt when it’s added to the layout, when its plugin is reloaded or swapped, or when the bar flips between horizontal and vertical.
The last fix is about direction: the PR “fixes growth direction for expanding widgets (tray, indicators)”. Widgets now get a fixedEdge property telling them which side stays put as they expand, so whatever is already showing keeps its place under your pointer. The manual also notes you can now hover anywhere on the bar to peek at the inactive indicators, instead of just left of the clock.
Existing setups are handled by two migrations. The first writes the tray where the bar used to draw it, since the bar now simply draws widgets in the order the layout lists them (the default layout now puts the tray first in the right section). The second splits an existing center section at its anchor: the anchored widget stays in center, and whatever flanked it moves to centerBegin and centerEnd, “so the bar looks as it did”. Both leave replacement bars, clones or third-party, untouched.
Widget authors get new options too. barWidget.defaultSection in a plugin manifest now accepts centerBegin and centerEnd, and widgets that don’t set it now land in centerEnd. A manifest asking for center also lands in centerEnd, so a new widget never pushes the clock off center. The commands follow along: omarchy plugin enable omarchy.media --section centerEnd and omarchy bar move omarchy.weather --section centerBegin --index 0 are the new examples in the manual.
