techblogogy

3 min read

I riced my Linux setup without writing a config by hand

Omarchy gave me a great starting point. Claude did the rest, from Hyprland keybinds to a matching theme across every app, one plain-English request at a time.

I’ve tried to “rice” a Linux desktop several times over the years: tiling window manager, matching colours everywhere, a bar that shows exactly what I want. Each time I gave up about a weekend in, somewhere between reading the fourth wiki page on a config format and finding out the terminal, the bar and the launcher each want colours in a different syntax.

This time I finished, and I didn’t write a single line of config by hand.

Omarchy is the right starting point

Omarchy is DHH’s opinionated Arch + Hyprland setup. You install it and you get a complete, good-looking, keyboard-driven desktop: Hyprland, Waybar, Walker as the launcher, a terminal, Neovim, and a theme system that switches everything at once.

I love it for one reason above all: it’s opinionated, and it’s all plain text. Every piece of it is a readable config file in ~/.config. That makes it the perfect thing to hand to an agent, because there’s nothing hidden and nothing to click through.

The workflow

I ran Claude Code in a terminal on the machine itself and described what I wanted in plain words. The pattern was the same every time:

  1. Ask it to read first. “Look at how Omarchy structures its Hyprland config and themes before changing anything.” This alone prevented most of the damage an agent can do to a desktop.
  2. One change per request. “Make the gaps smaller.” “Put the clock in the middle of the bar.” Small requests are easy to check and easy to revert.
  3. Reload and look. Hyprland and Waybar reload their configs live, so every change was on screen within a second.
  4. Commit. ~/.config is a git repo now, so any bad change is one git checkout away.

Some of the requests, in my actual words:

  • “Workspaces 1-5 on the left monitor, 6-9 on the right, and make Super+number follow that.”
  • “Make a theme from this wallpaper and apply it to Hyprland borders, Waybar, the terminal and Neovim.”
  • “Add a bar module that shows the current track from whatever is playing, and hide it when nothing is.”
  • “Super+Shift+S should screenshot a region straight to the clipboard.”

The last one turned into a keybinding like this:

# ~/.config/hypr/bindings.conf
bind = SUPER SHIFT, S, exec, grim -g "$(slurp)" - | wl-copy

I would never have remembered that grim, slurp and wl-copy are the three Wayland tools you pipe together for that. I didn’t need to.

The part that surprised me: themes

Theming is where ricing usually dies, because every program takes colours differently: Hyprland wants rgba(), Waybar wants CSS, the terminal wants its own TOML or INI, Neovim wants a Lua colourscheme. Omarchy already solves this with a theme folder per theme. Claude generated a complete new theme from a wallpaper, in every one of those formats, consistent with each other. That’s the kind of tedious, cross-format consistency work agents are genuinely great at.

Why this matters beyond a pretty desktop

Ricing used to be a hobby for people with the patience to learn five config languages. With an agent it becomes a design exercise: I decide what I want the machine to feel like, and the translation into config is handled for me. I understand my setup better now, too, because every change came with an explanation I could read.

And I love Omarchy for making this easy. A clean, opinionated, text-only base is exactly what you want to hand an agent. The same is true for codebases.