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How to change the default terminal in Omarchy
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omarchy-intel-macs.md

Getting Omarchy humming on a NVIDIA-based Intel Mac

Running Omarchy on older Intel Macs with NVIDIA graphics? Here's what you need to know.

NVIDIA Driver Issues

If your Mac has an older NVIDIA card (e.g., Kepler-era chipsets found in 2012-2016 MacBook Pros), the drivers are largely unsupported on modern Linux. Getting them working is currently difficult and often unsuccessful.

Ghostty + NVIDIA = Broken

Omarchy now defaults to Ghostty in OpenGL mode. If you're running on an NVIDIA stack with older chipsets, literally nothing works — you'll likely get a blank screen or crashes.

Until you fix the terminal, you can't even use the GUI network manager. To connect to WiFi, you'll need to use iwctl from a TTY:

iwctl
station wlan0 scan
station wlan0 get-networks
station wlan0 connect "Your Network Name"

The Fix

Switch to Alacritty, which handles these older graphics stacks better:

omarchy-install-terminal alacritty

Or manually edit ~/.config/xdg-terminals.list:

Alacritty.desktop

Adjusting Screen Resolution

The default resolution is often too small to read comfortably on 15"/16" MacBook Pros. After switching terminals, adjust the display scaling:

nvim ~/.config/hypr/monitors.conf

Add or update these lines:

env = GDK_SCALE,2
monitor=,preferred,auto,2

This sets 2x scaling for both GTK apps and the Hyprland compositor.

Hardcoded Ghostty References

These scripts still reference ghostty directly and may need adjustment:

File What it does
bin/omarchy-restart-terminal Sends SIGUSR2 to ghostty specifically
bin/omarchy-font-set Updates ghostty config and reloads it
bin/omarchy-launch-screensaver Launches screensaver in ghostty
config/hypr/input.conf Ghostty-specific touchpad scroll rule

How Terminal Selection Works

Omarchy uses xdg-terminal-exec as the terminal launcher, which reads from ~/.config/xdg-terminals.list. Most keybindings use $TERMINAL (set to xdg-terminal-exec), making them terminal-agnostic once you switch.

References

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