Omarchy Shortcuts on a Mac Keyboard: What Changes

TL;DR: I’m running Omarchy on an M1 MacBook Pro via omarchy-mac, and Omarchy ships with 200+ keybindings. Almost all of them work unchanged on Apple hardware. About fifteen don’t, because Apple keyboards have no Print Screen key, put media functions on the top row, name the lid switch differently, and the trackpad ships with different defaults under Asahi. This is the list of what changes, how to do each thing on a Mac, and the one-line reason for each — lifted straight from the fork’s source comments.

The Cmd+Shift+4 moment

A few days into this machine, I went to grab a screenshot the way muscle memory says to: reach for the Print Screen key, or failing that, Cmd + Shift + 4. Neither exists on this keyboard in any form Omarchy’s defaults recognize. I had to go find the Mac binding.

That was the only hardware surprise that actually hit me. Everything else on this list I found by reading the fork’s source rather than by getting stuck — but if you’re coming from a normal PC keyboard, screenshots are where you’ll get stuck too, so that’s where this starts.

Hands stay on the keyboard

What I like most about Omarchy is that it takes vim’s founding idea seriously and applies it to the whole desktop: your hands should never have to leave the keyboard, and a few keystrokes should get you wherever you need to be. A mouse is a good tool for discovery — exploring an app you don’t know yet, poking at something unfamiliar. As a daily driver it’s slow, and it slows you down in a way you stop noticing until it’s gone; the reach between every action is the tax. Once the bindings are in your hands you move at the speed of thought, and nothing in computing feels more like magic than that.

Ten to learn first on a Mac

These are unchanged from upstream Omarchy, and they’re the ten I’d learn first. Four of them went into my hands in the first days without my deciding to: focus and workspace switching, the two menus, terminal and close. Super is Command on Apple keyboards — the fork’s manual says so directly: “On an Apple keyboard, Command is the Super key used throughout this manual.” (manual/34)

Sources: tiling and workspace bindings in tiling.lua, menus and Super + K in utilities.lua, the terminal in applications.lua.

The fourth binding my hands picked up is the agent launcher. If you’ve read the parent post about getting Omarchy running on this hardware in the first place, you’ll know why: it opens the same agent the OS hands your segfaults to. The three AI bindings below are also in applications.lua.

If your own agent loop lives in a terminal most of the day, that first row is the one to bind into your hands first.

Screenshots and recording: there’s no Print key

This is the biggest chunk of the list, and it’s the one Mac users hit first. Upstream Omarchy binds screenshots, recording, color picking, and OCR to a physical PRINT key (default/hypr/bindings/media.lua):

• PRINT → screenshot
• Alt + PRINT → screen recording
• Super + PRINT → color picker
• Super + Ctrl + PRINT → extract text (OCR)

Apple keyboards have no PRINT key, so those four are dead on a MacBook. The fork’s comment on why: “Mac keyboards have no PRINT key, so quattro’s PRINT-based screenshot binds are dead keys on this hardware.” It adds F-key rebinds:

Practically: Super + F11 — or Cmd + volume-down without holding Fn, see below — is the closest thing to the old Cmd + Shift + 4 region-capture reflex.

Because Apple’s top row emits media keycodes rather than plain F-keys by default, the fork binds the media keycodes too, so the same physical presses work without holding Fn. Its comment: “Apple keyboards emit media keys on the top row, so the F-key captures above need Fn held. Bind the media keycodes too and the same presses work bare.”

Color picker and OCR have no Mac rebind in the fork — they stay on PRINT, which means they’re not reachable from the keyboard on this hardware. They’re still reachable via the Omarchy menu (Super + Space). If you use those two often, the community thread below is worth a read, and so is the manual’s screenshots chapter, which lists the same table.

Brightness keys drive the keyboard backlight, not the screen

Upstream binds Shift + XF86MonBrightnessUp/Down to screen brightness maximum/minimum. The fork replaces that behavior for keyboard backlight instead, because Apple Silicon MacBooks have no dedicated keyboard-brightness key to bind to. The comment: “SHIFT+brightness drives the keyboard backlight (F1/F2 Mac layout). Modern Apple Silicon MacBooks have no dedicated XF86KbdBrightness key, so SHIFT+F1/F2 is the only accessible control; replaces upstream’s max/min.” (Same media.lua as above.)

The binds are on SHIFT + XF86MonBrightnessDown and SHIFT + XF86MonBrightnessUp; on Apple Silicon those keycodes are F1 and F2 respectively — the fork’s own keybindings-menu test says so in its header comment.

Fn and the top row

The keyboard runs in hid_apple fnmode=1 — macOS-style behavior, where a bare top-row press fires the media function (volume, brightness, playback) and holding Fn gets you the literal F1–F12 keycode. That’s the same mode macOS uses by default, and it’s why the media-keycode rebinds in the screenshot section above exist at all: without them, every F-key screenshot bind would need Fn held every time. Source: manual/34.

The lid: fixed in config, not on the keyboard

Nothing extra to learn — the fork already rebinds it, and that’s the only reason it fires at all. Upstream’s clamshell handling listens for the generic “Lid Switch” device. On Apple Silicon that device doesn’t exist under that name; the fork’s comment: “Apple Silicon names the lid switch ‘Apple SMC power/lid events’, not the generic ‘Lid Switch’, so quattro’s binds above never fire on this hardware.” The fork adds switch:on/switch:off binds against the correct device name, wired through omarchy-hyprland-monitor-clamshell. Source: default/hypr/bindings/utilities.lua. There’s no new keybinding to learn here — it’s a config-level fix, not a key change, and it’s the reason clamshell mode isn’t just broken by default.

Trackpad: scrolling and clicking default the Mac way

This one isn’t a keybinding change, it’s a default-behavior change, and it’s worth knowing about even though there’s no key to memorize. The fork’s input.lua flips two upstream defaults: natural_scroll = true (upstream ships false) and tap_to_click = false. The comment: “Match macOS: natural scrolling, and physical clicks instead of taps. On the Asahi touchpad, disable_while_typing alone does not stop stray taps while typing; turning off tap_to_click does.” Source: default/hypr/input.lua.

The manual adds two-finger click for right-click and a 0.4 scroll factor, both overridable in ~/.config/hypr/input.lua if you don’t want the macOS-matched defaults.

One thing worth flagging even though I haven’t hit it myself: the fork’s own docs describe a boot-time race where the Apple HID driver rebinding can lose to logind, leaving the trackpad dead for that session while the keyboard and an external mouse keep working. The fork ships a fix that loads the Apple HID drivers from the initramfs to close the race. I’m noting this because it’s documented, not because I’ve seen it — docs/apple-silicon-trackpad.md has the detail if a boot ever leaves your trackpad unresponsive.

What didn’t change

Everything else — tiling, workspace management, the Omarchy menu, clipboard history, the agent-launch bindings in the table above — is identical to upstream Omarchy. That’s most of the 200+. The Mac-specific list here is short on purpose: a handful of hardware differences, about fifteen bindings, and the rest of your muscle memory carries over.

If you want how I ended up on this hardware in the first place, the parent post covers the install and what still bites. If you want the full picture rather than just the Mac deltas, two things are worth reading instead of me re-deriving them. Filip Franik’s “Omarchy Has 227 Shortcuts: Here’s How I Remember Them” is the best treatment of the full keymap I’ve found, and it’s not Mac-specific. And if you hit the same screenshot confusion I did, the community has already written it up in more depth than I have here: Discussion #611, “Guide: Adapting Omarchy’s Screenshot & Media Keys for MacBooks (or Keyboards without a Print Screen key)”. Omarchy’s own manual chapter for people coming from macOS or Windows is worth a read too.