Pulse
One Omarchy bar icon that always shows you the thing holding your machine back.
CPU, memory, storage, network and GPU — five dashboards, one widget, zero guessing about which one is the problem.
The idea
A system monitor that shows you five numbers is asking you to do the ranking.
Pulse does the ranking. Every reading across all five domains is scored on one
shared severity scale, and the bar icon becomes whichever domain is currently
worst — the chip changes shape, the colour changes with it, and the caption
says what it is and why:
▨ 1.5 GiB ▨ 89°C ▨ 137.3 GiB
RAM · LOW HEADROOM CPU · PACKAGE TEMPERATURE DISK · FREE SPACE ON /
You never choose what to watch. It tells you.
And when you want the detail, all four original dashboards are still there,
whole, behind their own names.
Each card is that domain's own chip, its own readout in its own grammar, its own
verdict, and its own history trace. Clicking one opens that domain in full.
Constraints — the page that only exists because they are together
Separate monitors can each tell you how they are doing. None of them can
tell you which one is the problem, because none of them can see the other three.
Domains are ranked worst first. Every reading gets a severity bar on one 0–1
scale, a real value, and a sentence explaining what it costs you — not a
threshold, an explanation:
| Domain | What it watches |
|---|
| CPU | sustained load, saturated threads, package temperature, scheduler pressure, power profile, throttling events |
| RAM | free headroom, pages swapped to disk, memory pressure, full stalls, compressed swap held in RAM |
| Disk | free space on the followed filesystem, drive busy time, I/O pressure, full I/O stalls, drive temperature, SMART warnings and wear |
| Network | route out, internet round trip, packet loss, Wi-Fi signal, gateway round trip |
| GPU | video memory in use, sustained load, temperature, and whether the driver is currently holding the card back |
The same scores drive the bar icon, so whatever the icon is showing is always
the top row of this page.
Every readout, priced against live values
Right-click the icon. Auto is the default. Below it, every readout of every
domain, each showing what it would read right now — so you pin against a real
number rather than a name.
Pinning stops the icon moving. Auto puts it back.
Nothing was summarised away
Each domain page is the original plugin's dashboard in full — the same
sub-tabs, tables, controls and numbers, reading the same recorder and the same
seven days of history.
| Page | Tabs |
|---|
| CPU | Overview · CPU hogs · Processor lab · About |
| RAM | Overview · RAM hoarders · Memory lab · About |
| Disk | Overview · Disk hogs · Storage lab · About |
| Network | Overview · Wi-Fi · Interfaces · Talkers · Data · Network lab · About |
| GPU | Overview · GPU hogs · Graphics lab · About |
Connect to Wi-Fi, kill a memory hoarder, switch power profile, follow a
different filesystem — all of it still works, because it is the same code.
Settings
Every setting the five domains have, grouped by domain, plus the one decision
that only exists once they share a bar entry: what the icon follows.
Settings live in the widget's own shell.json entry, namespaced per domain
(cpu.displayMode, ram.groupByApp, disk.mountpoint, barSource), so the
four no longer compete for the same keys.
Install
omarchy plugin add clones the widget. It does not start the collectors.
Without the installer every domain reads "recorder offline".
omarchy plugin add https://github.com/nixfred/pulse.git
python3 ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/nixfred.pulse/install.py
Or from a clone of this repo:
git clone https://github.com/nixfred/pulse.git
cd pulse
python3 install.py
The installer publishes the plugin atomically, installs and starts the five
collector services, puts the widget on the right of your bar, and disables the
four plugins it replaces without deleting them.
Requires Omarchy with Quickshell, and python3.
No scrolling, ever
Every page fits on one screen. The panel is handed its real content height and
grows to the room the screen has, the Constraints page shows each domain's top
readings with the rest one click away, and the chooser lays nineteen readouts
out in two columns rather than one long list.
| Page | Height |
|---|
| About | 572 px |
| Overview | 711 px |
| Chooser | 817 px |
| Constraints | 925 px |
| RAM | 933 px |
| Network | 938 px |
| CPU | 979 px |
| Settings | 1038 px |
| Disk | 1043 px |
IPC
omarchy-shell nixfred.pulse open
omarchy-shell nixfred.pulse show net # jump to a domain
omarchy-shell nixfred.pulse showTab net 1 # domain, then sub-tab
omarchy-shell nixfred.pulse constraints # the ranking
omarchy-shell nixfred.pulse modes # the readout chooser
omarchy-shell nixfred.pulse pin auto # icon follows the constraint
omarchy-shell nixfred.pulse pin cpu # or pin it
omarchy-shell nixfred.pulse display cpu 2 # that domain's readout
omarchy-shell nixfred.pulse historyRange ram 86400
omarchy-shell nixfred.pulse status # all five, as JSON
status nests each domain's original status object under its key, so anything
that scraped one of the four plugins needs only to reach one level deeper.
How it is built
Panel.qml bar icon, page switcher, the two merged pages' host
Model.js helpers for the merged chrome only
sections/
Constraints.js the severity model — the one piece of shared judgement
OverviewPage.qml five cards
ConstraintsPage.qml the ranking
ChooserPage.qml every readout
SettingsPage.qml every setting
AboutPage.qml what this replaced
CpuSection.qml ┐
RamSection.qml │ the four original panels, ported whole
DiskSection.qml │ (plus their chips, graphs and models)
NetSection.qml ┘
GpuSection.qml the one domain with no plugin before Pulse
collectors/ the five Python recorders and their user units
Each section gets a small host bridge supplying the members the original code
already used — bar, opened, setting(), close() — so the ported bodies
needed no rewriting at all.
The collectors were deliberately left alone. Four daemons, four user units,
four state directories, unchanged, and GPU Pulse added a fifth of each in the
same shape. The merge stopped at the UI, so it cost no
recorded history and any one of them can still be debugged on its own.
Versions
The version lives in one place, manifest.json. The panel header, the About
page, the bar tooltip, omarchy-shell nixfred.pulse status and the badge at the
top of this page all read it from there, so none of them can disagree.
Every release bumps it, adds an entry to CHANGELOG.md, and is
tagged vX.Y.Z — a fix bumps the patch, a new capability the minor.
Credits
Pulse is the merge of four plugins:
Built for Omarchy by Fred Nix.
More Omarchy plugins: omarchy.nixfred.com
MIT.
