󰦛 Rift

Your workspaces, remembered. Your apps, back in one click.

A native Omarchy bar plugin that saves which applications belong on a workspace — and brings them back on demand or at login.

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/nixfred/rift.git --enable

Every morning it's the same ritual. Workspace 1: terminal in ~/Projects/api, browser, editor. Workspace 2: Slack, Signal, music. Workspace 3: another terminal, another repo, docs. Ten clicks, twenty keystrokes, four cds — before you've written a single line.

Session managers try to fix this by snapshotting window geometry, and they break the moment you plug in a different monitor, change a font, or look at them funny.

Rift doesn't save pixels. It saves intent.

A Rift is a named set of applications. Open it and Rift grabs the next empty workspace, launches each app, and gets out of the way. Hyprland tiles. Rift remembers. That's the whole contract — and it's why it never breaks.

Honesty section — this is the whole product, so here's exactly what is and isn't captured.

A Rift is a singleton, and Open means "make it whole": if the Rift is open, Rift focuses its workspace and relaunches any of its own apps that are missing (quit the Claude terminal → Open brings Claude back, leaves Brave alone). A Rift counts as open only while at least one of its apps is still on that workspace — an unrelated leftover window doesn't fool it.

• Terminals remember their directory. Ghostty, Kitty, Alacritty, Foot, WezTerm — Rift reads /proc/<pid>/cwd and relaunches the terminal in the same project folder. Your shell is back where you left it.
• Real launch recipes, not guesses. Apps are resolved to their .desktop entry (via StartupWMClass, id, or binary match) so they launch the way Omarchy launches them. Falls back to the executable only when there's no entry.
• Global apps are global. Spotify, Signal, Discord, Slack, 1Password, Bitwarden are tagged ensure — Rift will never launch a second copy if one is already running anywhere. They're also deselected by default at save time so your "Work" Rift doesn't own your music.
• Pick exactly what's in the Rift. The save panel lists every detected app with a toggle. Don't want the browser in there? Untick it.
• Knows when you drifted. If the apps on a Rift's workspace no longer match what was saved, the panel lights up the 󰑐 button — one click (or U) re-records it. Every update keeps the previous recipe, so Revert is always one click away.
• Survives compositor restarts correctly. Runtime workspace associations are keyed to HYPRLAND_INSTANCE_SIGNATURE and pruned against live workspaces, so stale "this Rift is on workspace 7" claims die with the session that made them.
• Shell noise filtered out. Omarchy shell, Quickshell, Walker/wofi/rofi/fuzzel never end up inside a Rift.
• Launched apps know their Rift. Every process gets RIFT_NAME and RIFT_SLUG in its environment — hook your own tooling on it.

The panel is fully keyboard-driven, in the same KeyboardPanel style as Omarchy's own widgets.

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/nixfred/rift.git --enable

Pick a bar section when prompted (defaults to right). 󰦛 appears in the bar. Click it.

Manual install:

git clone https://github.com/nixfred/rift.git ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/nixfred.rift
omarchy plugin enable nixfred.rift

omarchy plugin remove nixfred.rift          # disables + removes the plugin dir
rm -rf ~/.config/rift ~/.local/state/rift   # your Rift definitions + runtime state (optional)

Rift runs no daemon and installs nothing outside those two directories and the plugin folder.

• Omarchy with the Quickshell bar (plugin schemaVersion: 1)
• Hyprland (hyprctl on PATH)
• python3 — stdlib only, no pip, no venv, nothing to install
• gtk-launch for .desktop-based apps (ships with GTK, already on Omarchy)

BarWidget.qml   the 󰦛 button, startup hook, IPC target  (nixfred.rift)
Panel.qml       the KeyboardPanel UI — browse / save / update
rift_helper.py  stateless JSON backend: hyprctl in, JSON out
tests/          unittest suite for the helper (python3 -m unittest)

The QML never scrapes shell output. Every interaction is one python3 rift_helper.py <command> call that prints a single {"ok": true, "data": …} line. Writes are atomic (tmp + rename). Failures come back as {"ok": false, "error": "…"} and render in the panel in the bar's urgent colour — nothing silently fails.

A Rift looks like this:

{
  "schemaVersion": 1,
  "slug": "api-work",
  "name": "API work",
  "startup": true,
  "savedAt": 1787000000,
  "apps": [
    { "id": "terminal:ghostty:/home/you/Projects/api", "name": "Ghostty", "kind": "terminal",
      "cwd": "/home/you/Projects/api", "launch": ["ghostty", "--working-directory=/home/you/Projects/api"],
      "policy": "launch", "selected": true },
    { "id": "desktop:code", "name": "Visual Studio Code", "kind": "application",
      "launch": ["gtk-launch", "code"], "policy": "launch", "selected": true }
  ]
}

Hand-edit it. Add a launch the detector couldn't see. It's just JSON.

Everything the panel does, you can do from a shell:

H=~/.config/omarchy/plugins/nixfred.rift/rift_helper.py
python3 $H state                       # what's on this workspace + all rifts
python3 $H save "API work"             # save focused workspace
python3 $H open api-work               # focus or launch
python3 $H startup api-work on|off     # toggle autostart
python3 $H revert api-work             # swap back to the previous recipe
python3 $H rename api-work "API v2"    # rename (slug + association follow)
python3 $H delete api-work             # remove a rift
python3 $H help on|off                 # help walkthrough in the panel
python3 $H new-workspace               # jump to next empty workspace

# Drive the panel from a keybind:
omarchy-shell nixfred.rift toggle      # also: open / close / show / hide

Bind it in Hyprland and never touch the mouse:

bind = SUPER, R, exec, omarchy-shell nixfred.rift toggle

1. No geometry. Ever. Window placement is the compositor's job. Saving it is how session managers rot.
2. The UI is the product. The helper is small, boring, and JSON-only on purpose.
3. Zero install friction. If Omarchy runs, Rift runs. No daemons, no pip, no services.
4. Idempotent everywhere. Opening an open Rift focuses it. Autostart can't double-fire. Global apps don't duplicate.
5. Your data is yours. Plain JSON in XDG paths. Delete the folder and Rift is gone without a trace.

Unfreeze path (in progress — see AGENTS.md):

• Named Hyprland workspaces (rift-<slug>) as the identity, not recycled numeric ids
• Entry is the recipe: cwd, command, resume policy visible and togglable
• Selective drift review

Frozen until that path is boring: launch stages, import/export, templates, project-aware recipes, tmux/SSH persistence.

AIs (Codex, Larry, Grok): read AGENTS.md first. Feature freeze, working trees, and Agent: trailers live there.

Humans: CONTRIBUTING.md.

git clone https://github.com/nixfred/rift.git && cd rift
python3 -m unittest discover -s tests -v   # backend tests (does not cover QML)
omarchy plugin validate .                  # manifest check

MIT © 2026 Fred Nix