Goodbye Dock: Retraining Twenty Years of Desktop Habit for Omarchy

I have spent more than twenty years in IT. I have administered university networks, managed server rooms, and lived inside every desktop metaphor since Windows 3.11. Give me a bottom dock, draggable windows, and a minimize button, and I am home.

Then I installed Omarchy, DHH's Arch-based Linux desktop. For the first hour I felt like a first-day intern.

There was no dock. My windows refused to be dragged. Everything tiled itself whether I asked permission or not. My first honest thought: this is broken. My second, more honest thought: this is a different paradigm, and the problem is my muscle memory, so I had better learn it.

This is the guide I wish someone had handed me on day one.

The interface is fine. The paradigm is different.#

Three decades of desktop computing trained us to treat windows like papers on a desk: grab them, drag them, stack them, minimize them into a dock. Omarchy runs on Hyprland, a tiling window manager. Windows are tiles, arranged automatically. The mouse is optional. The keyboard is the interface.

You do not fight this. You retrain yourself. That takes about a week, and it starts with a single mental shift.

The one shift that matters#

Stop arranging windows. Start assigning workspaces.

Think of each workspace as its own full screen with a single job. Workspace 1 is the browser. Workspace 2 is the terminal. Workspace 3 is Signal. You do not shuffle windows around a shared desktop. You send each window where it belongs, then jump between contexts.

The bar along the top of the screen is the only dock that matters. It shows your workspaces as numbers. Click them if you want, but the habit forms faster when you use keys: Super + 1, Super + 2, Super + 3. Scroll the wheel while holding Super to flip through them.

(Super is the Windows key on a PC keyboard, or Command on a Mac.)

Within a workspace, Hyprland tiles everything for you. Two windows split the screen. A third joins the layout. You never position anything. You just decide who lives on which workspace. That decision, made once, replaces the daily archaeology of digging through minimized windows.

The ten-key survival kit#

You do not need to memorize fifty bindings. These ten cover ninety percent of everything I did with a mouse for twenty years. They are the defaults in Omarchy 4.0, the version I am running as I write this: 

• Super + Space: the Omarchy menu, which doubles as the app launcher. This replaces clicking dock icons. Start typing an app name, hit Enter. If you want a menu with nothing but apps in it, Super + Alt + Space opens that.

• Super + 1 / 2 / 3: jump to a workspace.

• Super + Shift + 1 / 2 / 3: send the current window to that workspace.

• Alt + Tab: cycle through windows on the current workspace.

• Super + Arrow: move focus between tiles. Super + Shift + Arrow swaps two windows.

• Super + F: fullscreen. The panic button when you want one thing and only one thing.

• Super + W: close a window.

• Super + J: toggle the split direction between vertical and horizontal.

• Super + T: toggle a window between tiling and floating.

• Super + Tab: next workspace.

And the one that unlocks all the others: Super + K shows the entire keybinding cheat sheet on screen. It is the tutorial that is always one keystroke away. Every time you feel stuck for the first two weeks, hit it.

Yes, you can still drag windows#

This surprised me. Floating windows still exist. They are just opt-in.

Super + T pops a window out of the tiling grid into free-floating mode. Once it floats, hold Super and drag with the left mouse button to move it, and Super with the right button to resize it. When you are done, hit Super + T again and the window snaps back into the grid, wherever you left it. My old habits survived the move, tucked behind one keystroke.

I use it rarely now. The tiles are usually right. But knowing the escape hatch exists made the first week tolerable, and some windows, like a floating calculator or a quick dialog, genuinely belong outside the grid.

You do not have to float a window just to resize it, either. With a tiled window focused, Super + Minus widens it and Super + Equal narrows it. Add Shift to the same keys to adjust height when the split is stacked. Add Alt for a small nudge or Ctrl for a big one. When two tiles drift out of balance, a few taps bring them back.

One binding I added: equalize the split#

After a session of floating, dragging, and nudging, I often ended up with two tiles at some lopsided ratio and no fast way back to an even split. Omarchy does not ship a key for that, but Hyprland's dwindle layout has a message that sets the split ratio directly, and Omarchy makes adding a binding a one-liner.

Open ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua and add:

o.bind("SUPER + SHIFT + J", "Equalize window split", hl.dsp.layout("splitratio 1 exact"))

Hyprland reloads the config when you save. Now, with either window focused, Super + Shift + J resets the split between it and its neighbor to a clean 50/50. A ratio of 1 is an even split, and exact tells Hyprland to set that value rather than nudge by it. Super + Shift + J is unbound by default, so nothing needs to be unbound first. It sits next to Super + J, which flips the split direction, so the two keys make a natural pair.

If you have more than two windows, the binding evens out the split at the level of the focused window, which is usually the one you care about. Hit Super + K afterward and you will see your new binding listed with the defaults.

Where to learn more#

• The Omarchy Manual at omarchy.org/manual: the official manual, written by DHH, aimed squarely at people in my situation. The Hotkeys chapter has the full binding reference.

• fly-omarchy at github.com/mahesh-thakur92288/fly-omarchy: an interactive trainer that runs inside your real Hyprland session and drills the bindings into muscle memory. The windows you move during a drill are real windows.

• A printable cheat sheet at acrogenesis.com/omarchy-cheat-sheet: a compact one-pager that matches the current default bindings. Go old school. Print it and tape it under your monitor for the first week.

• The Omarchy Discord and r/omarchy: both are active, friendly to beginners, and full of people asking exactly the questions you are about to ask. Though, I am waiting for someone to start an Armada/Vector community. The Omarchy ethos aligns with Nostr's vibes. We shouldn't use centralized services.

One note before you search: omarchy-official.org is not the official site, despite the name. Its own footer calls it an unofficial fan site, but it ranks well and looks the part. The official sources are omarchy.org and the code at github.com/omacom/omarchy. The older Omarchy 3 manual still lives at learn.omacom.io if you find yourself on a 3.x install.

The moment it clicks#

It took me about a week. Then one morning I noticed I had opened the launcher, fired a browser onto workspace 1, a terminal onto workspace 2, and Signal onto workspace 3, and flipped between all three without ever touching the mouse. My hand had been resting on the keyboard the whole time.

Twenty years of dragging windows, retired in a week. I still catch myself reaching for a dock that is not there. Then I hit Super + 2 and stop missing it.

That is the real pitch for Omarchy. It respects you enough to ask for a week of learning in exchange for a desktop that gets out of your way. The dock was training wheels. I just did not know it until I took them off.