Coming From Mac or Windows
If you’ve spent years on macOS or Windows, your fingers know a hundred things your brain has forgotten it ever learned. This chapter is the translation layer: where those instincts go in Omarchy. The features themselves are covered in depth elsewhere - this is just the map.
Super is the center of everything
All the muscle memory you’ve built around Cmd or the Windows key transfers to one key: Super. That’s the Windows key on a PC keyboard, and it’s the anchor for nearly every hotkey in Omarchy.
Your Spotlight or Raycast or Start-menu reflex becomes Super + Space. That opens the Omarchy menu, which launches apps, changes settings, installs software, captures the screen - just about everything. Start typing to filter. There’s also a dedicated apps-only menu on Super + Alt + Space. See navigation.
There’s no dock and no desktop icons
Nothing to click to launch things, no icons to arrange on the desktop. Apps start from a hotkey (Super + Return for the terminal, Super + Shift + Return for the browser, and Super + K for a list of everything that’s mapped) or from the menu. The one persistent piece of UI is the top bar, which covers what the menu bar, system tray, and Notification Center did for you before - and nearly every widget on it does something on left, right, and middle click.
Windows place themselves
The biggest mindset shift: you don’t drag windows around or snap them to screen halves. Open a window and it takes the whole screen. Open a second and they split it. You never fish a window out from under another one, because windows don’t overlap.
When you genuinely need a floating window, Super + T toggles the active one out of the tiling (and back). But give the tiling a real chance first - it’s the heart of the whole thing. Navigation walks you through it.
Workspaces will feel familiar: they’re macOS Spaces or Windows virtual desktops, except you’ll actually use them, because Super + 1/2/3/4 jumps straight to one and Super + Shift + 1/2/3/4 sends the active window there. No animation delay, just instant jumps. This means that you might not even need multiple monitors, if you were used to that before.
Copy and paste just work
On the Mac you had Cmd + C everywhere. On Windows you had Ctrl + C everywhere - except the terminal, where it kills your program. Omarchy gives you Super + C, Super + X, and Super + V, and they work everywhere, including the terminal. No separate reflex to learn for the shell.
Windows folks: your Win + V clipboard history lives on Super + Ctrl + V, and it holds images as well as text. See unified clipboard & history.
The translation table
| You reach for | In Omarchy |
|---|---|
| Spotlight / Raycast / Start menu | Super + Space - the Omarchy menu |
| AirDrop | LocalSend, via Super + Ctrl + S - see GUIs |
| Cmd + Shift + 4 / Win + Shift + S | Print Screen - see screenshots & recording |
| Notification Center | Notification history on Super + Shift + Alt + , |
| Time Machine (for the system) | Automatic system snapshots on every update |
| App Store / downloading an installer | Install in the menu, or omarchy pkg add - see other packages |
| System Settings / Control Panel | Setup in the menu, which edits plain config files - see dotfiles |
Some things really are different
A lot of settings live in text files you edit, not panels you click through. That sounds primitive until you realize it means every tweak can be seen, copied to your next machine, and put in version control. The Setup menu drops you straight into the right file and restarts whatever needs restarting when you’re done.
Updates come through one command - Update > Omarchy - that updates Omarchy itself and every package on the system, taking a snapshot first. No per-app updaters nagging you at random. See updates.
Software comes from a package manager, not from downloaded installers.
And when you close a window, the app actually quits. There’s no macOS limbo where the program keeps running with no windows. Super + W - or Super + Q, if that’s the finger memory you arrived with - means gone.
On Mac hardware
Omarchy runs well on Intel Macs - see Mac support. And the keyboard is kind to you: Omarchy doesn’t remap anything, and Linux treats the Command key as Super, so Super sits right where Cmd always was. Your thumb won’t notice the move.
Give it two weeks
The instincts transfer faster than you’d think. Skim the hotkeys chapter once, and whenever you blank on a binding, hit Super + K - it shows you all of them. That’s the only hotkey you actually have to memorize.