Walker launcher missing after update

Walker was the app launcher Omarchy shipped through the 3.x series. In Omarchy 4 it is gone. The v4.0.0 release notes are blunt about it: Walker is gone, and SUPER + SPACE now opens the Omarchy menu itself. Nothing is broken on your machine. The keys just moved.

The part that trips people up is that the two shortcuts swapped meanings:

Key	Omarchy 3.x	Omarchy 4.x
Super + Space	Walker app launcher	Omarchy menu (apps and commands)
Super + Alt + Space	Omarchy menu	Apps-only menu

So if you press Super + Space expecting a plain list of applications and get a command palette with Apps, Learn, Style, Setup and System in it, you are looking at the new default, not a fault. Checked against the shipped bindings in 4.0.4 (default/hypr/bindings/utilities.lua) and against 3.8.4 (default/hypr/bindings/utilities.conf).

The fix

If you just want your apps back (4.0.0 through 4.0.4)

1. Press Super + Alt + Space. That is the dedicated apps-only launcher now. The v4.0.0 notes describe it as having fuzzy and acronym matching with live app icon indexing.

2. Or press Super + Space and start typing an app name. The unified menu matches installed apps as well as Omarchy commands, so you usually do not need the second shortcut at all.

3. From a terminal or a script, the same two surfaces are:

   omarchy-menu toggle        # the full menu
   omarchy-menu toggle apps   # the apps-only launcher

If you want Super + Space to open apps directly

Omarchy 4 moved Hyprland config from .conf to Lua, so this goes in ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua, not in any .conf file.

1. Open the file:

   $EDITOR ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua

2. Unbind the default first, then bind your own. Order matters:

   hl.unbind("SUPER + SPACE")
   o.bind("SUPER + SPACE", "Apps", "omarchy-menu toggle apps")

3. Optionally put the full menu somewhere else:

   hl.unbind("SUPER + ALT + SPACE")
   o.bind("SUPER + ALT + SPACE", "Omarchy menu", "omarchy-menu toggle")

4. Reload. Hyprland re-reads its config on save, but forcing it and checking for Lua mistakes is cheap. The shell itself does not need restarting for a binding change:

   hyprctl reload
   hyprctl configerrors

The hl.unbind then o.bind pattern is the one the stock ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua documents in its own comments, and the one the Dotfiles chapter of the manual uses. See the conf to Lua migration notes if your bindings did not survive the upgrade at all.

Where your old config went

The Quattro upgrade script does not delete your Walker settings, but it does move them out of the way:

• ~/.config/walker is renamed to ~/.config/walker.omarchy-upgrade-to-quattro.<timestamp>.bak, where the timestamp is the moment you ran the upgrade.
• ~/.config/elephant is removed outright. There is no backup of it. Same for ~/.config/autostart/walker.desktop.
• The user units app-walker@autostart.service and elephant.service are deleted, along with /etc/pacman.d/hooks/walker-restart.hook.

Nothing reads the .bak folder. It is there so you can copy custom entries across by hand. The new equivalents are ~/.config/omarchy/extensions/omarchy-menu.jsonc for your own menu entries and ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json for plugin state.

Verify it worked

omarchy-menu toggle apps            # apps launcher should appear
pacman -Qq | grep -E '^(walker|walker-bin|omarchy-walker|elephant)' ; echo "exit $?"
ls -d ~/.config/walker* 2>/dev/null

The pacman -Qq grep should print nothing and report exit 1. If it prints package names, your Quattro upgrade did not finish removing the retired set. The ls should show only a .bak directory, or nothing at all on a fresh 4.x install.

Why it happens

Omarchy 4.0.0 rewrote the whole desktop shell as one Quickshell process. The bar, notifications, OSDs, lock screen, polkit agent and the menu are now plugins inside omarchy-shell. Once the menu could search its own nested entries, keeping a second palette with a second shortcut stopped making sense, so the launcher was merged into the menu.

Walker also carried real costs. It ran as a resident walker --gapplication-service process started from an XDG autostart entry, and on at least one amdgpu machine that process hard-froze the desktop because the autostart entry carried no renderer override, reported in issue #6443 and closed by dhh the day before the 4.0.0 release with the note that Walker is gone on Quattro. The 3.x series also had a long tail of walker and elephant packages disappearing or mismatching on upgrade, which is what issue #2546 and its siblings were about.

The upgrade path is explicit. omarchy-upgrade-to-quattro lists omarchy-walker, walker-bin, elephant and thirteen elephant-* packages in its retired set and removes them in one pacman transaction, with a dependency-aware fallback group so they come off together rather than failing one at a time.

If that did not work

The Apps menu is empty or says “Nothing here yet”. This is a real bug, not the redesign. Issue #11107 reports it as a regression in 4.0.3-1, still open as of 2026-09-16, with the Apps submenu caching an empty row set that never recovers in that session. The one cause pinned down so far is a cloned or third-party menu plugin: a clone of omarchy.menu gets a scoped shell API whose appLibrary is null, so its Apps list stays empty (issue #11028, also #10946 and #11307). Check what you have loaded and drop the clone:

omarchy plugin list
omarchy plugin remove <your-clone-id>
omarchy restart shell

One reporter on #11107 confirmed the stock launcher worked again once they deleted their own launcher plugin.

Typing a query that matches nothing does nothing. Walker had an elephant websearch provider that fell back to a browser search. The native menu has no such fallback. Issue #7012 tracks it and is still open. Two pull requests add a fallback to the menu (#7075 and #8012), and neither is merged as of 2026-09-16, so for now you need your own binding or menu entry.

Flatpak apps do not show up. Tracked separately in issue #8650, where the session XDG_DATA_DIRS misses the Flatpak export directories. Not a Walker issue.

You are still on 3.x. Different problem entirely. On 3.1.5 and later, install the meta package rather than the individual providers, then restart the services: omarchy-pkg-add omarchy-walker followed by omarchy-restart-walker. Full detail is on command not found: elephant.

The shell itself is not running. If neither shortcut does anything and the bar is missing too, the problem is upstream of the menu. See Quickshell crashes or bar missing.

Related

• Omarchy manual: Navigation and Shell Plugins
• Upgrading 3 to 4 (Quattro)
• Custom keybindings lost after Quattro
• Where did Waybar go
• command not found: elephant
• Keybindings reference
• Release v4.0.0