Workspace name

An Omarchy bar widget that gives the current workspace a name and an icon, and lets you set both.

Hyprland workspaces are numbered, and a number tells you where you are but not what you were doing there. This widget shows a row of workspace buttons with the current workspace's name or icon beside them: invoicing, bug #4412, reading. Switch workspaces and the label follows.

A workspace can also carry an icon, on its own or in front of the name. An icon alone is often enough — a workspace can be the one with the terminals without also being called "terminals" — and it reads faster in the corner of your eye than a word does.

The widget draws a row of workspace number buttons by default, with the current workspace's name or icon beside them. Click the workspace you are already on to open the naming panel.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/jankeesvw/omarchy-workspace-name.git --enable

The widget lands in the left section of the bar by default. Move it with omarchy bar move, or from the bar's own settings panel.

Remove

omarchy plugin remove jankeesvw.workspace-name

That takes the widget out of the bar and deletes the plugin. The names and icons you gave your workspaces are yours, not the plugin's, so they stay in $XDG_STATE_HOME/workspace-hud/. Delete that directory if you want them gone too.

Use

Workspace numbers appear on the bar by default. Clicking one takes you to that workspace, and clicking the one you are already on opens the naming panel, since there is nothing left to switch to. It holds a name field and, under it, a grid of icons. Fill in either, both, or neither, then press Enter to save. An empty name clears the name, the first cell of the grid (×) clears the icon, and clearing both hides the label. Escape closes without saving.

The panel opens on the name, because renaming is what you came for on most days. Press Down to step into the grid and walk it with the arrow keys. Every move takes the icon under the cursor, so what you are pointing at is always what Enter will save. The icon the workspace already has is where the cursor starts and stays highlighted, Up off the top row hands focus back to the name, and clicking a cell does the same as walking onto it.

The grid holds what a workspace is usually for: shells and editors, mail and chat, media, infrastructure. Brand marks are mostly left out, since a workspace is a kind of work rather than a logo. For anything the grid does not have, write the file directly. That takes a codepoint as readily as the glyph, which is covered below.

You can also bind a key to open the panel directly:

-- ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua
o.bind(hyper .. "R", "Workspace name", "omarchy-shell shell toggle jankeesvw.workspace-name")

Workspace indicators

Each button carries the workspace's icon where one is set and its number where none is. Clicking one focuses that workspace, and clicking the focused one opens the panel to name it. It stands in for the omarchy.workspaces widget rather than sitting beside it, so take that one out of the bar first.

An icon standing in for the number keeps a button one character wide, which is the width the stock indicators are built at, so nothing about the shape of the bar changes. Set "numbers": true to show both instead. That reads as icon 4 and grows every button to fit.

The reason to want this: an icon on the workspace you are already standing on is only half useful, since the row of numbers is where you look to find the one you want. Feeding the row and the label from the same file is what keeps them from ever disagreeing.

The indicators are on by default. To hide them, set "indicators": false in the widget's entry in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json:

{ "id": "jankeesvw.workspace-name", "indicators": false }

Where names and icons are stored

One plain-text file per workspace, in $XDG_STATE_HOME/workspace-hud/<id>, and the icon beside it in <id>.icon (usually ~/.local/state/workspace-hud/1 and 1.icon, and so on). No daemon, no database.

That means other tooling can join in. Reading the name of workspace 3 is a cat:

cat ~/.local/state/workspace-hud/3

And setting one is a redirect. The file is watched, so the bar picks up the change without being told:

echo "deploying" > ~/.local/state/workspace-hud/3

Icons work the same way, and the file accepts a codepoint as readily as the glyph itself — which is what makes them scriptable at all, since a Private Use Area character is awkward to get into a shell command and impossible to read back in a diff:

echo f120 > ~/.local/state/workspace-hud/3.icon

Which is handy for scripts: a build wrapper can label the workspace it is running in, and clear the label when it finishes.

The directory is kept private to your account — mode 700, with 600 files — because what you call your workspaces says what you are working on. Your own scripts read and write it as freely as ever; other accounts on the machine do not. A directory you deliberately made a symlink is left as you set it up.

A name is shown as one line of plain text, with angle brackets removed and at most 64 characters, since the file is whatever was echoed into it rather than something this widget wrote.

Names are not remembered across reboots any longer than the state directory is; nothing prunes them, so a name stays on a workspace until you clear it.

Where the icons come from

The font. There is nothing icon-specific in the widget: it draws a character, and if the bar's font has that character you get a picture instead of a box.

That works because Omarchy's bar uses a Nerd Font — an ordinary monospace face patched to carry whole icon sets (Font Awesome, Material Design, Devicons, Octicons, Seti-UI) in Unicode's Private Use Area. An icon is literally a character, which is why echo f120 > 3.icon is enough to set one.

Recommended: whatever Nerd Font your bar already uses. Omarchy ships JetBrainsMono Nerd Font and the grid above was checked glyph by glyph against it, so the presets are safe out of the box. Any other Nerd Font works too; only the coverage changes.

To go beyond the grid, search the Nerd Fonts cheat sheet by name and take the codepoint. Check it before you rely on it, because the cheat sheet describes the whole Nerd Fonts collection and your build may be a subset:

fc-list ":charset=f121" family    # empty means your font does not have it

If it comes back empty, you are not stuck: the toolkit falls back to any other installed font that does have the codepoint. Installing a font that carries the icon is enough — nothing has to be configured. The one case fallback cannot fix is a codepoint your main font already uses for something else, since the main font wins; there you would have to change the bar's font rather than add one.

Requirements

Omarchy with omarchy-shell (the Quickshell-based bar) and Hyprland. Nothing else: no extra packages, no helper scripts.

License

MIT