How to make macOS look and feel like Omarchy

Ask a chatbot how to make a Mac feel like Omarchy and it hands you a shopping list. AeroSpace, SketchyBar, Ghostty, a prompt, a theme pack, good luck, kid. That is seven weekends of config, and not one of them mentions the parts a Mac flatly refuses to do. I did the seven weekends. You get the page I was looking for when I started: two paths, one stack, one command, and the scorecard nobody else keeps.

What Omarchy is, and why a Mac person cares

Omarchy is DHH's Arch Linux setup with opinions. Hyprland tiling, a top bar, one keybinding grammar, twenty-two themes that flip the whole desktop at once, and a menu tree that retires the settings app for good. It is fast, it is quiet, and it runs on Linux. Only Linux. That last part is where most of the interest dies.

Because most of the people asking own a Mac. The hardware is fine. The window management is from 2005 and proud of it. Nobody wants a new laptop. They want the workflow. Fair enough.

The two paths

Run Linux on the Mac. Asahi or a VM. You get real Omarchy, real Hyprland, and a machine that is no longer a Mac in any way your other software will recognise. If the workflow is all you want, this is the honest answer, and I will not pretend otherwise. The state of it, with dates so you know when I was wrong, is in Omarchy on a Mac: run Linux, or make macOS feel like it.

Keep macOS, port the feel. Tiling, bar, borders, keybindings, every theme, on top of the OS you already paid for. Your Mac apps keep working. This is the rest of the page, and it is the one I live in every day, so at least one person has tested it.

The stack

Each Omarchy piece has a Mac stand-in. None of them are mine, and I am not going to pretend they are. The work was wiring seven strangers into one keybinding grammar and one theme switch, so they stop arguing and start looking like a desktop.

Omarchy piece	On the Mac	What it gives you
Hyprland tiling	AeroSpace	Focus, move, swap, resize, fullscreen, five workspaces, multi-monitor
Waybar	SketchyBar, laid out like the v4 bar	Workspaces, clock, weather, battery, wifi, audio, agents spend
Window borders	JankyBorders	Active-window border in the theme colour
Keybindings and menus	Hammerspoon	⌘⌥Space menu tree, ⌥K overlay, theme chooser
Themes	`theme` script, synced from Omarchy's own templates	All 22 v4 themes; terminal, editor, btop, bar and borders change together, light and dark follow the system
Prompt	Starship	Same prompt as Omarchy
Launcher, emoji, clipboard	Raycast, free plan	⌘Space, ⌘⌃E, ⌘⌃V
Agent multiplexer (herdr)	herdr from Homebrew	⌘⌃↩ opens a Ghostty with herdr; how the port went

Install it

There is an article, and there is a five-minute video. If you would rather watch than read, the video is the whole port in one sitting, scorecard included. The article continues underneath either way.

One command. It installs Homebrew if you somehow do not have it, runs the Brewfile, links every config (anything already there gets a dated .bak, I am not a monster), loads the launchd agents, pulls the Omarchy themes, and starts the services.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dividendsolo/omarchy4mac/main/install.sh | bash

macOS will ask you to grant Accessibility to Hammerspoon and AeroSpace. Say yes. It will ask twice. Say yes twice. Then ⌥K for the keybindings, ⌘⌥Space for the menu. Run the same script again to update. --dry-run tells you what it would touch without touching it, for the trust issues.

The repo is omarchy4mac.

What the Mac cannot do

I keep a scorecard against Omarchy 4 in the repo, row by row, because "it's basically the same" is what people say right before it is not. As of today it matches on the tiling, bar, borders, themes, menu, keybinding overlay, web apps, screensaver, shell defaults, wallpapers, and herdr. The gaps, and I am not hiding any of them:

Omarchy has	Mac status	Why
Theme on tmux, lazygit, VS Code	Planned	Waiting until tmux is daily again
Night light toggle, OCR capture, bar hide key	Planned, each one small	Not done yet
Themed volume and brightness indicator	Never	Apple owns that box
Quickshell control panels	Never	Wayland layer-shell has no macOS equivalent
Themed lock screen	Never	The macOS lock screen cannot be restyled
Window groups, pin, opacity, scratchpad, gap toggle	Never	Hyprland dispatchers AeroSpace does not have
Chromium live theming	Never	Needs Omarchy's Chromium fork

Call it 71 percent of Omarchy 4, the scorecard is fussy about that. The missing 30 is mostly Apple standing in the doorway with its arms folded, and no amount of config gets past that. The Omarchy 4 on the Mac post has the full table and the one day it took to get there. DHH shipped v4, my port was three weeks old and already behind. Story of the whole hobby.

Keep it going

omarchy4mac is free and stays free. If it saved you the seven weekends, GitHub Sponsors is open. No pressure. Some pressure.