omatrix

An Omarchy theme whose wallpaper is cmatrix.

omatrix

The desktop is the terminal: the Osaka Jade palette on the terminal's background colour, with the rain from cmatrix falling behind your windows — same glyphs, same 40 ms terminal cadence, same green tails and white heads the terminal would show, drawn with the system monospace font on a real character grid.

Two parts, two repos:

The theme lives in theme/omatrix/ here and is published as its own repo (Omarchy installs themes from a repo root, and themes can't carry code).

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/0x1ocean/omarchy-omatrix.git --enable
omarchy theme install https://github.com/0x1ocean/omarchy-omatrix-theme.git

Switching to any other theme with omarchy theme set hides the rain instantly; switching back brings it back. The plugin only draws while the active theme ships an omatrix.toml, so any theme can opt in by adding one.

Remove it again with:

omarchy plugin remove io.github.0x1ocean.omatrix
omarchy theme remove omatrix # or just switch: omarchy theme set osaka-jade

The plugin writes nothing outside ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json (its own entry, added by omarchy plugin enable) and needs no extra packages.

From a checkout instead: ./install.sh symlinks this directory as the plugin and theme/omatrix as the theme, enables the plugin and applies the theme (--no-theme to skip that). ./uninstall.sh reverses it.

Reading cmatrix.c shows there is no animation in it at all. The terminal is a COLS x LINES grid; every 40 ms (napms(update * 10)) the loop walks every second column, writes a new random head cell, clears one tail cell, and ncurses repaints only the cells that changed. Nothing ever moves — cells are written and erased on a fixed grid, and that is the look.

cmatrix.js is a line-for-line port of var_init() and that main loop (new-style and old-style scrolling, -a pacing classes, -k mutations, -b/-B bold parity, -m lambda, -r rainbow, the matrix[0] staging row and the ' ' sentinel included). The one liberty: a column that is still counting down spaces[] and holds no glyphs is not walked, which the tests show is unobservable (same cells, same randomness). It has no QML in it, so node --test tests/*.test.js runs it against the invariants of the C code; settings.js (option precedence, ANSI colour mapping) is covered the same way.

Rendering mirrors the terminal too:

• stateCanvas is a COLS x LINES pixel image — one pixel per terminal cell holding glyph index, palette slot and bold flag. Each tick repaints only the cells cmatrix wrote (a few hundred), exactly what ncurses does. The canvas item is sized in logical pixels divided by the window's device pixel ratio and each cell painted as a 1/dpr square, so on a scaled monitor (say 1.25) the image is still exactly one texel per cell instead of a ×ばつ image with antialiased, smeared cell values.
• atlasCanvas draws the charset once with the system monospace font at the shell's base size (the same 12 px the terminal uses at 9 pt), regular and bold.
• shaders/matrix.frag runs once per screen pixel on the GPU: find the cell, read its state, sample the glyph, colour it. Cost is flat regardless of how many cells changed.

The layer itself is opaque in the theme's terminal background colour, so Hyprland blends nothing and the wallpaper beneath is occluded; the rain stops whenever it can't be seen (fullscreen window on that monitor, session lock, another theme) and slows down on battery.

The cell grid comes from FontMetrics (advance of M, ascent + descent), rounded to whole pixels like a terminal emulator, so glyphs land on the same 7 x 16 px cells alacritty would use with the default font. Tails are the theme's ANSI green (green in colors.toml) and heads are ANSI white (foreground) — the pairs ncurses asks for, mapped the way Omarchy's terminal templates map them.

Cost on a 1080p laptop panel (Intel Iris Xe): about 11 % of one core in the shell plus ~2 % in Hyprland at the default 25 Hz — less than alacritty + cmatrix fullscreen. It scales linearly with update_delay, drops to ~0 while paused (fullscreen window, lock, another theme), and slows down on battery.

Every knob is a cmatrix flag. The theme's omatrix.toml carries the defaults; the plugin's entry in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json overrides them per machine (either key style works):

{ "id": "io.github.0x1ocean.omatrix", "bold": "partial", "asynchronous": true }

IPC:

omarchy-shell omatrix status # JSON: active theme, grid, palette, cadence
omarchy-shell omatrix pause
omarchy-shell omatrix resume
omarchy-shell omatrix toggle
omarchy-shell omatrix wake # replay the empty-terminal fill

node --test tests/*.test.js # engine (cmatrix.js) and settings (settings.js) tests
quickshell -p Preview.qml # renderer in a window with live per-tick timings
./build-shaders.sh # after editing shaders/matrix.frag

install.sh symlinks the checkout, so edits are live: the shell hot-reloads plugin QML, and theme changes apply on the next omarchy theme set omatrix. The theme repo is a git subtree split of theme/omatrix:

git subtree split --prefix=theme/omatrix -b theme-split
git push git@github.com:0x1ocean/omarchy-omatrix-theme.git theme-split:main

GPL-3.0-or-later. cmatrix.js is a derivative of cmatrix (© Chris Allegretta, Abishek V Ashok and contributors, GPL-3.0). Palette from Omarchy's Osaka Jade theme.