// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Show HN: Omacosy – Omarchy-style tiling desktop for macOS, no SIP
omakase + macOS + cosy. An omarchy-style setup for
macOS: tiling window management with a real Super key and Hyprland's
dwindle layout, a themed status bar written for it (bar, popups,
sliders and screen dimming in one process),
focus-follows-mouse, trackpad workspace swipes with a Mission-Control-
style workspace overview (live previews included), focused-window
border rings, and unified theme switching down to the wallpaper —
bootstrapped from this one repo.
The whole desktop environment idles at about 157MB of physical
footprint — what Activity Monitor calls Memory — across WM, bar, three
background daemons, the swipe daemon and Karabiner. Resident set size
reads ~322MB, but RSS counts each process's share of the same shared
system frameworks, so footprint is the honest figure. Measured on this
machine docked to a second display, largest first:
A second display is not free: the bar and the border overlay each draw
per-screen, and AeroSpace carries a second workspace set. On one
display the same set measured ~155MB. The dwindle daemon used to be on
this list; the split direction is decided by a short omacosy-helper
run on focus change now, so nothing resident does it.
These figures move with uptime, so treat them as a band rather than a
constant. omacosy-overview is the swing: it caches a half-resolution
capture per window shown, so it starts near 9MB and settles around
37MB — measured over repeated opens, it plateaus there rather than
climbing, because the cache is refiltered to the visible set each time.
AeroSpace drifts the other way, reading higher the longer it runs. Packaging the bar as an .app
(which is what buys the wi-fi network name) cost about 1MB — the bundle
is a directory and an Info.plist, not a second copy of anything.
It is mostly self-built: five small signed Swift binaries replace what
would otherwise be a pile of dependencies (several of which are broken
on macOS 26 — see below).
Posture: built for macOS 26 (Tahoe) on one desk — a MacBook Pro
plus one external display. It generalizes deliberately (roles instead
of hardware names, per-display notch detection), but "works for me"
is the honest tier. The permission setup is real work. Issues and PRs
welcome; support promises are not made.
The clone location matters: configs are symlinked into the repo, and
macOS privacy (TCC) blocks launchd services from reading
~/Documents, ~/Desktop and ~/Downloads — a clone there makes
the installer fall back to copying configs (still works; edits then
need an install.sh re-run to apply).
install.sh rebuilds only the binaries whose sources changed and
restarts their agents, so an update is a pull plus a re-run and this
wraps both. It refuses a clone with local edits, and refuses one whose
branch has diverged, rather than deciding either for you.
There is no background update check. The bar makes exactly one network
call (the weather), and a daemon polling GitHub on a timer would
quietly make that two while broadcasting when the machine is awake.
Nothing here contacts the network unless you run it.
Idempotent — re-run after pulling changes. Installs Homebrew if
missing, runs brew bundle, compiles the helper binaries, generates
the AeroSpace config from your app choices, symlinks configs (backing
up anything it would replace), hides the native menu bar, applies the
default theme, and starts services.