Zavu

One API. Every message.

A dark Omarchy theme derived from Zavu Brand System V1.1. Communication infrastructure designed with scientific precision and editorial minimalism — applied to a desktop.

Forked from Last Horizon (MIT), fully recolored and re-geometried.

What is Omarchy?

Omarchy is an opinionated Arch Linux desktop built around the Hyprland tiling compositor, by DHH (basecamp/omarchy). It ships a curated set of tools — a Quickshell status bar, a launcher, notifications, a lock screen, terminal, editor, browser — and wires them together so that a single command restyles all of them at once.

That command is omarchy theme set, and a theme is what it reads. A theme is a directory of small config files: one colors.toml that defines the palette, plus per-application files for anything that needs more than colors. Applying a theme copies that directory into place, generates the configs that aren't shipped by hand, and reloads every running app. Nothing here is a patch or an override — it is the whole look of the machine, versioned as text.

You need Omarchy for this repository to be useful. On any other Linux setup the files are still readable as a color reference, but there is nothing to apply them with.

Install

omarchy theme install https://github.com/zavudev/omarchy-theme.git
omarchy theme set Zavu

Palette

Token	Hex	Name	Role
background	#000000	Void Black	System substrate
foreground	#FFFFFF	Pure White	Primary type
surface	#18181B	Surface	Popups, menus, cards
elevated	#27272A	Surface Elevated	Hairline borders, hover
muted	#A1A1AA	Muted Gray	Metadata, secondary text
accent	#615FFF	Signal Violet	Focus, selection, active state

System colors (§5.3 — state only, never decoration): #4DF688 operational · #FFDA5E attention · #FF5E5E failure · #6EFAFF activity

Design decisions

• One accent, everywhere. Violet appears on the focused window border, the selected row, and control focus. Nowhere else. The budget is ~3% of any composition (§5.5).
• Editorial geometry. Square corners, 1px borders, no shadows, no bloom. Technical-drawing precision, not a SaaS card.
• Instrument motion. A single curve — cubic-bezier(0.22, 1, 0.36, 1), the brand's ZAVU.motion.defaultEasing. No overshoot, no spring physics; the brand system forbids both outright (§8.3, §12).
• Six hues in the terminal. The brand defines four system colors plus the accent, and syntax highlighting needs them separable. Orange (#FF9C5E) is a 50% mix of warning and error — the one derived value, and still inside the family. Nothing here is off-palette.

Wallpapers

The first two are the Strands WebGL shader that runs in the hero of zavu.dev. tools/strands.c is a literal CPU port of its fragment shader, evaluated in the hero's resting state (no pulse, no fan, no pointer, no active strand) with the uniforms the site passes it: count=5 · scale=1.5 · amplitude=1.05 · glow=2.6 · speed=0.18.

01-strands.png — the hero's channel palette (#06B6D4 #EAB308 #FF4242 #1877F2 #7C3AED). What the website shows.	02-strands-signal.png — same geometry, a single accent in the Signal Violet family. Keeps the one-accent rule (§5.5).

| | | | 05-strands-fan.png — uFanSpread open. Five channels converge to a single point on the left and separate to the right. On the site this is a scroll state that lasts an instant. | 06-strands-pulse.png — mid-click-pulse, where the whole bundle collapses to the accent. The most restrained frame the shader has: thin violet threads on void. |

Plus 03-void.png — pure black. The void as substrate.

The last two are states the website only passes through. The renderer exposes every uniform, so anything the shader can reach can be frozen:

tools/render 3440 1440 fan
tools/render 3440 1440 pulse
.strands-bin 3440 1440 --fan 0.3 --active 2 --focus 1 > custom.ppm

Any resolution

The shader depends on aspect ratio, not just scale: uv is normalized by height and the env envelope is measured across uv.x, so stretching a 16:9 render to 21:9 is not the same image as rendering it at 21:9. Render per resolution instead of scaling:

tools/render 3440 1440                    # channel palette
tools/render 2560 1600 signal             # brand palette
tools/render 3840 2160 channels out.png

The repository ships 3440×1440. tools/render compiles the shader on first use (needs gcc and ImageMagick) and takes about 100 ms per frame, so generating a set for every display you own is cheap.

Live wallpaper (optional)

04-strands-live.png is the same still image as 01-strands.png, and on a stock Omarchy that is all it is. Patch the background plugin, though, and the name suffix turns it into the real shader, running live on the desktop:

omarchy plugin clone omarchy.background
# edits land in ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/<user>.background/Background.qml

Add to the root Item (and import Quickshell.Services.UPower at the top):

readonly property string liveShaderName: {
  var base = String(displayedBackground).split("/").pop()
  var m = base.match(/([A-Za-z0-9_]+)-live\.[A-Za-z0-9]+$/)
  return m ? m[1] : ""
}
readonly property url liveShaderUrl: liveShaderName === ""
  ? ""
  : Util.fileUrl(stateHome + "/omarchy/current/theme/tools/" + liveShaderName + ".frag.qsb")
readonly property bool liveShaderAllowed: !UPower.onBattery

And inside the PanelWindow, right after the base image:

ShaderEffect {
  id: liveShader
  anchors.fill: parent
  visible: root.liveShaderUrl != "" && root.liveShaderAllowed
  blending: false
  fragmentShader: root.liveShaderUrl
  property real uTime: 43.0
  property vector2d uResolution: Qt.vector2d(width, height)
}

FrameAnimation {
  running: liveShader.visible
  onTriggered: liveShader.uTime += frameTime
}

Then omarchy restart shell — a plugin hot-reload is not enough, the layer-shell surface has to be rebuilt.

Three things make this cheap rather than a battery leak:

• Occluded means free. The wallpaper is a Wayland layer surface. Cover it with an opaque window and the compositor stops sending frame callbacks, so FrameAnimation stops and the shader stops drawing. Measured at 0.00% CPU with windows over it.
• On battery it turns itself off. UPower.onBattery hides the shader, and the still image underneath — the same pixels, rendered from the same shader — takes over. The desktop does not change appearance, it just stops moving. Back on AC it resumes on its own.
• uTime starts at 43. That is the exact frame the PNGs were rendered at, so the still and the live version are the same image at t=0. Switching between them, in either direction, has no visible seam.

Two live variants ship: 04-strands-live.png (resting bundle) and 07-strandsfan-live.png (fan open). Both resolve to a .qsb of the same name.

The shader source is tools/strands.frag (Qt 6 dialect) and tools/build-shaders compiles it once per variant, substituting the FAN constant. Run it after editing the shader:

tools/build-shaders     # -> strands.frag.qsb (FAN=0), strandsfan.frag.qsb (FAN=0.20)

Workspace icons (optional)

Also not part of the theme — a patched copy of Omarchy's workspace widget that labels each workspace with an icon instead of leaving it a bare number, and ships a panel to change them without editing QML.

omarchy plugin clone omarchy.workspaces
cp plugins/workspaces/*.qml ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/<user>.workspaces/
omarchy restart shell

omarchy plugin clone names the clone after your user, and both files are written to work under any such name: the widget takes its id from whatever the bar injects, so nothing here has to be renamed.

Right-click any workspace to open the panel; left-click still focuses the workspace as before. Each row takes an icon and a label: the icon identifies the workspace at a glance, the label says what it is in words. There is an IPC entry point too, for a keybinding:

o.bind("SUPER + ALT + W", "Workspace icons", "omarchy-shell <user>.workspaces toggle")

Click a row, then click an icon from the grid at the bottom — that writes it and saves in one gesture. The grid is 48 common ones; anything outside it goes in the row's field by hand, in either of the two forms you are likely to have an icon in: pasted as a glyph, or typed as a codepoint (f121, U+F121, 0xF121). Both are needed — a Nerd Font glyph cannot be typed and a codepoint cannot be read — so the live preview beside each row settles it before you save. Enter saves a typed value, an empty field clears the icon back to a plain number.

The icons are characters in the bar's font, not images. Omarchy ships JetBrainsMono Nerd Font and every codepoint in the grid was checked against it. To go past the grid, search the Nerd Fonts cheat sheet and verify before relying on it — fc-list ":charset=f121" family comes back empty if your font lacks it. It usually still renders anyway, because the toolkit falls back to any other installed font that has the codepoint.

Values are written to the widget's entry in shell.json, so they survive a restart and stay editable by hand like the rest of the bar:

{
  "id": "<user>.workspaces",
  "icons": { "1": "\uf121", "2": "\uf268" },
  "labels": { "1": "code", "2": "web" }
}

Labels show on the focused workspace only. Nine of them at once eat half the bar and the icon already identifies each one, so the word is there for where you are rather than for where you are not. Set "labelsAlways": true on the same entry to show them all.

Written by hand, prefer the \uXXXX escapes above over pasting the glyphs: JSON decodes them to the same characters, and unlike a raw Private Use Area character they survive a copy-paste and are legible in a diff.

The defaults in Workspaces.qml are stored as codepoints rather than literal glyphs — Private Use Area characters do not survive every text pipeline, and a map that renders as a column of empty strings in an editor is impossible to review.

Two other changes to the stock widget, both visible above: workspaces 1–9 are always shown rather than only the occupied ones, and the focused workspace keeps its icon and takes the accent color instead of being replaced by a filled square — which used to hide the icon on the one workspace you were looking at.

What's in here

File	Drives
colors.toml	The palette. Omarchy generates the terminal, editor, and browser configs from this alone.
shell.toml	Bar, menus, notifications, launcher, lock screen, polkit
hyprland.lua / .conf	Borders, gaps, corners, shadows, animation curves
hyprlock.conf	Lock screen input field
btop.theme, cava_theme	Terminal monitors
walker.css, swayosd.css, gtk.css, mako.ini	Launcher, OSD, GTK apps, fallback notifications
neovim.lua, vencord.theme.css	Editor, Discord
tools/	The Strands wallpaper renderer and live shaders
plugins/workspaces/	Optional patched workspace widget (see above)

License

MIT, inherited from the base theme — see LICENSE.

The Zavu brand identity (logo, isotype, wordmark, and name) is not covered by that license and remains the property of Zavu.