Where did Waybar go after the Omarchy 4 update?

Waybar drew the top bar on every Omarchy release up to and including v3.8.4. On v4.0.0 “Quattro” (2026-08-14) it was removed. The strip along the top of your screen is still there, but it is now part of the Omarchy shell, one long running Quickshell process that also draws the menu, the notifications, the OSD popups, the control panels, and the lock screen. So the bar is not missing. Waybar is, and the config, the CSS, and the omarchy-*-waybar commands went with it.

Run omarchy-version first. Everything below applies to 4.0.0 through 4.0.4. On 3.8.4 and earlier, Waybar is still the bar and none of this applies.

The fix

1. If you see no bar at all, it may just be hidden. Press Super + Shift + Space, which is bound to “Toggle top bar” in the shipped Hyprland bindings. The same thing lives in the menu under Trigger, Toggle, Menu Bar.

2. If you script that toggle, know that omarchy toggle bar on currently hides the bar and omarchy toggle bar off shows it. The wrapper is a one liner that hands whatever you typed to the bar-off state flag, so on turns the off flag on. Amvurguezo filed this as issue #7022; it is still open, and the 4.0.4 copy of omarchy-toggle-bar still has no inversion. Plain omarchy toggle bar with no argument flips the state correctly.

3. Find your old config. The upgrade does not delete it, it renames it:

   ls -d ~/.config/waybar.omarchy-upgrade-to-quattro.*.bak

   The timestamp is the moment you ran the upgrade. config.jsonc, style.css, and anything else you kept in that folder are inside.

4. Edit the bar through its new config file, ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json, under the bar key. Every widget is one entry in bar.layout.left, bar.layout.center, or bar.layout.right, and its settings sit inline on that entry. There is no separate style sheet:

   jq .bar ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json

5. Prefer the commands to hand editing, because they keep the file valid and reload the shell for you:

   omarchy bar position bottom
   omarchy bar transparent toggle
   omarchy bar move omarchy.clock --section center --index 0
   omarchy bar set omarchy.clock format "HH:mm"
   omarchy bar defaults

   You can also just drag. Grabbing an empty patch of bar and pulling it to a screen edge moves it, and dragging a widget reorders it.

6. Add or remove whole widgets with the plugin commands. omarchy plugin list prints every widget the shell knows about with its id:

   omarchy plugin enable omarchy.media --section center
   omarchy plugin disable omarchy.weather

7. Port custom modules. A Waybar custom/* module becomes an inline entry with type set to command:

   { "id": "vpn", "type": "command", "exec": "~/.config/omarchy/bar/scripts/vpn-status",
     "interval": 5, "tooltip": "VPN", "onClick": "nm-connection-editor" }

   Your script can keep printing the Waybar style JSON it printed before, {"text": ..., "tooltip": ..., "class": ...}, or plain text. For something Waybar could not do, use "type": "qml" and drop a QML Item at ~/.config/omarchy/bar/modules/<id>.qml.

8. Replace the old commands. These are the ones that disappeared:

   Omarchy 3.x	Omarchy 4.x
   omarchy-refresh-waybar	omarchy refresh shell
   omarchy-restart-waybar	omarchy restart shell
   omarchy-toggle-waybar	omarchy toggle bar
   edit ~/.config/waybar/config.jsonc	omarchy bar ... or ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json
   edit ~/.config/waybar/style.css	theme plus ~/.config/omarchy/shell.toml

   Note that omarchy refresh shell is a reset, not a reload. It puts shell.json back to the Omarchy default and restores the default bar, exactly as omarchy-refresh-waybar reset the Waybar config. Copy your shell.json somewhere first.

Verify it worked

Waybar really is uninstalled, not broken:

pacman -Qi waybar          # error: package 'waybar' was not found
pgrep -af quickshell       # the running omarchy shell
omarchy shell shell ping   # IPC round trip to that process
hyprctl layers | grep omarchy-bar

If hyprctl layers shows omarchy-bar at a negative y value, the bar exists and is parked off screen, which means the hide toggle is on rather than the shell being dead.

Why it happens

The v4.0.0 release notes describe the whole shell being rewritten in Quickshell, with the bar, launcher, menus, notifications, OSDs, panels, lock screen and polkit agent living as plugins in one process. Waybar is on the retired package list in bin/omarchy-upgrade-to-quattro, which tries to remove every retired package in one pacman transaction and falls back to dependency groups, waybar playerctl being one of them, so a dependency between the two does not block the removal. The same script moves ~/.config/waybar, ~/.config/swayosd, ~/.config/mako and ~/.config/walker to timestamped .bak directories, and clears the old ~/.local/state/omarchy/toggles/waybar-off flag. Theming moved too: v3.8.4 shipped themes/*/waybar.css and default/themed/waybar.css.tpl, and v4.0.4 ships neither.

Two upgrade side effects are worth knowing about. jfbourdeau pointed out in discussion #6577 that the whole ~/.config/waybar directory is moved aside, so any data file you happened to keep in there, such as a watchlist read by a custom module, goes with it and the module silently falls back to defaults. And Orneyfish showed in issue #8357 that the upgrade overwrites ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json with the stock Quattro default instead of merging it, so a bar you had customized before the upgrade reverts. That issue is still open, and the previous file is at ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json.omarchy-upgrade-to-quattro.<timestamp>.bak.

If that did not work

• The bar is gone but the shell is alive, and toggling does nothing. v4.0.2 shipped a fix for the bar visibility toggle becoming unresponsive, so make sure you are past that release before debugging further.
• Nothing at all is drawn, no menu, no notifications. That is the shell failing rather than the bar, so start at quickshell crashes or bar missing.
• Your custom command module prints the raw JSON line instead of hiding. raetsch-hue traced this in issue #10319: an explicitly empty "text" falls through to the raw output. Until it is fixed, print nothing at all when the widget should be invisible.
• Widgets you added to shell.json before an update do not pick up new defaults. Once you have your own shell.json it is canonical, with no deep merge, so future default widgets will not appear on your bar. omarchy bar defaults gives you a clean slate.
• You genuinely want Waybar back. Install it yourself and launch it yourself, but treat it as unsupported: no Omarchy theme will style it, and the update indicator, the panels, and the Super + Ctrl panel hotkeys all stay with the Quickshell bar.

Evidence for the “where did it go” question is thin in the issue tracker on purpose, because this is intended behaviour rather than a bug. The clearest confirmation is discussion #7544, where CtByte answered a user hunting for the missing ~/.config/waybar/style.css by saying Quattro has no Waybar any more, only the new Quickshell bar. farangkao had made the same point a month earlier in discussion #6332.

Related

• The Top Bar in the official manual is the reference for widgets, panels and shell.json.
• Upgrading 3 to 4 for the rest of what the Quattro upgrade moves.
• Walker launcher missing after update is the same story for the launcher.
• Custom keybindings lost after Quattro and monitors.conf replaced by monitors.lua cover the other configs that moved.