Language

A system language selector for Omarchy Quattro — the one setting the installer never asks about.

Omarchy is English-only by design: the installer picks a keyboard layout and nothing else, so LANG stays en_US.UTF-8 until someone edits /etc/locale.gen by hand and runs locale-gen. This plugin puts that on the bar: a searchable list of every UTF-8 locale glibc ships, and a second list for regional formats when you want, say, a Slovenian keyboard, an English desktop, and metric dates.

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/sbelcl/omarchy-language.git --enable

Or, to set the language, translate the menu and install the Slovenian clock in one go — the path to hand someone who just wants a Slovenian desktop:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sbelcl/omarchy-language/master/setup | bash -s -- --with-panels

setup takes a locale (bash -s -- de_DE.UTF-8), is safe to re-run, and is the way to refresh the menu translation after an Omarchy update.

What it does

• Display language — sets LANG. Picking a language nobody has generated yet generates it on the way through; that takes a few seconds.
• Formats — sets LC_TIME, LC_NUMERIC, LC_MONETARY, LC_PAPER and LC_MEASUREMENT independently of the language, or leaves them following it.
• A Language row in the menu — under Posodobi/Update, beside Timezone, opening the same picker Omarchy's own settings use. This is where a language selector belongs; the bar widget exists because a plugin cannot add rows to the packaged menu, not because a bar is the right home for a settings action.
• Omarchy menu — translates the menu itself, where a table exists for the language. Off by default. See below for what this can and cannot reach.
• Bar label — the language code (EN, SL) or a globe glyph; the tooltip spells the locale out.

Click the widget, or bind the panel to a key:

omarchy-shell imnos.language toggle

How it works

Everything privileged is one localectl set-locale call. systemd-localed on Arch is built with locale-gen support, so that single call uncomments the locale in /etc/locale.gen, runs locale-gen, and writes /etc/locale.conf. Authentication is the ordinary polkit prompt for org.freedesktop.locale1.set-locale, answered by Omarchy's own agent — no sudo, and nothing in this plugin ever runs as root.

The locale list is glibc's own /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED, with English language and territory names read out of each locale's LC_IDENTIFICATION block, so the list tracks whatever glibc ships rather than a hand-kept table. Locale names are passed through exactly as SUPPORTED spells them: roughly half carry a codeset (en_US.UTF-8) and half do not (aa_ER, be_BY@latin), and that spelling is both what systemd matches before it agrees to generate a locale and the name locale-gen hands to localedef. Rewriting one form into the other breaks it.

Translating the menu

The Omarchy menu is the only part of the shell that is data rather than code: its rows live in JSONC and ~/.config/omarchy/extensions/omarchy-menu.jsonc overrides them by id. Switch the toggle on and all ~320 rows are rewritten in the system language. The shell watches that file, so the menu changes as the switch flips — no restart, no log out.

Two things make this less simple than it looks.

Overrides have to re-declare the whole row. The shell's own comment promises a per-key merge, but parseMenuJsonc normalizes every entry to a full object with empty-string defaults before merging, so {"label": "Omrežje"} lands as a row with no icon and no action behind it. Rows are therefore copied wholesale from the defaults with only label and title swapped. That is why the generated block records a hash of the file it copied from, and why the panel reports the translation out of date once Omarchy's own menu moves under it. Refresh re-copies from the new defaults.

The English word stays searchable. Menu search scores a description match, so each translated row carries its English label in description — typing network still finds Omrežje. Rows that already had a description keep it.

Your own rows and comments in the extension file are left alone: everything outside the generated block is preserved verbatim, the previous file is kept as .bak, and nothing is written until the result has been parsed back the same way the shell parses it. A file that fails to parse is dropped whole by the shell, taking your rows with it, so the generator refuses rather than risk that.

Adding a language

Drop a translations/<locale>.tsv next to the others — English<TAB>your language, one per line, # for comments. Keys are the English strings, not row ids, so a word translates once wherever it appears and a row Omarchy adds later using a word already in the table translates itself. Anything absent stays English, which is the right answer for Steam, Docker and Tailscale.

Limits

• LANG is read at login. Nothing can retrofit it onto the session you are in, so the panel offers a log-out row once a change lands.

• The bar and the panels stay English. Their strings are literals inside each plugin's QML and there is no hook for one plugin to reach another's (omarchy#7284 asks for the translation layer that would change this). The menu is reachable because it is data; nothing else is.

• The clock is English for a different reason. Qt.formatDateTime(date, format) ignores the locale — it renders Tuesday in a process whose Qt.locale() is sl_SI. date.toLocaleString(Qt.locale(), format) takes the same format string and renders torek. That is a one-line change, but it lives inside the clock's own QML, so it ships as a separate plugin: omarchy-clock-sl, installed by setup --with-clock.

• Non-UTF-8 locales are not offered. systemd will not auto-generate them, and you do not want one.

• Your home folders keep the names they were created with. ~/Documents, ~/Downloads and the rest come from xdg-user-dirs at first login, in whatever language was current then, and nothing renames them afterwards. A machine installed in Slovenian gets Dokumenti and Prenosi from the start; one switched later keeps the English names.

  setup deliberately leaves this alone. Renaming them moves real directories, and anything holding a path — scripts, an application's bookmarks, your own habits — breaks quietly. If you want it anyway, and you know nothing points at those paths:

  xdg-user-dirs-update --force

• This is the system language. Keyboard layout is a separate axis, set from /etc/vconsole.conf and shown by the built-in omarchy.keyboard-layout widget.

Settings

Key	Values	Default	Effect
display	Code / Icon	Code	Language code or globe on the bar

Set from Setup → Plugins, or inline on the widget's shell.json entry:

{ "id": "imnos.language", "display": "Icon" }

The string catalog

locales/sl.json is a plain map of English string to translation, installed to ~/.config/omarchy/locales/<lang>.json by catalog install (and by setup). The translated panel plugins read it at runtime rather than carrying Slovenian inside their QML, so one file covers every panel and a translator adds ru.json without touching anyone's code.

It is installed only when absent — once it is in your config it is yours to edit, and a plugin update quietly reverting your wording would be a miserable bug to find. catalog refresh overwrites deliberately, keeping a .bak.

Catalogs are named for the language, not the country: Slovenian is sl. si is Sinhala (si_LK) — the keyboard layout being called si is ISO 3166 naming Slovenia the country, a different standard answering a different question. A si.json would never load, and would collide with Sinhala the day someone writes one.

The rest of the desktop

Two companion pieces, because a plugin cannot reach into another plugin's QML:

Three translated panels, each a fork that reads sl.json and each declaring clonedFrom, so it takes the built-in's place in the bar and gives it back when removed:

• omarchy-clock-l10n — also fixes day and month names, which Omarchy renders through the C locale regardless of LANG (upstream fix in #10955).
• omarchy-power-l10n — battery, charge stats, power profile.
• omarchy-audio-l10n — output, input and stream volumes.

Each is a fork pinned to an Omarchy release, carried by hand. If #7284 lands a translation layer upstream, delete them rather than maintain them.

• omacom/omarchy#7284 — a translation layer for the shell's own strings, so the panels and dialogs stop needing a fork per panel. Prototype: sbelcl/omarchy@i18n-prototype.

Development

omarchy plugin validate .   # manifest against the schema the shell enforces
./test/model-test.sh        # Model.js, locales.awk, menu-translate; needs node
./menu-translate status     # what the panel's menu section is reading

The menu test is the one that matters: it runs the generator against the real Omarchy menu, merges the result through the shell's own MenuModel.js, and fails if any row loses its icon, action, aliases, when or checked — the exact damage a label-only override causes.

Model.js is deliberately Qt-free so the parsing, matching and argument building are testable under node; Panel.qml holds only the wiring and the UI.

Saving a file under ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/ hot-reloads the plugin, but a widget already placed on the bar can keep its existing instance through the reload — the shell logs Local plugin changed, reloading and nothing visibly changes. omarchy-restart-shell is the one way to be sure you are looking at the code you just wrote.

License

MIT