Clock bar

A second bar along the bottom edge of every screen, carrying world clocks laid out as one timeline: furthest behind your local time at the far left, furthest ahead at the far right, your own time dead centre.

 LA 08:24   NYC 11:24   LDN 16:24            17:24            SG 23:24   TOK 00:24 +1   AUS 01:24 +1   NZ 03:24 +1

An Omarchy 4 shell plugin (Quickshell). It reserves its own space, so Hyprland tiles windows above it exactly as it does for the top bar.

What it does

• Timeline layout. Side and position are derived from each zone's live UTC offset, not from config order. Reading left to right always moves forward in time, and a DST shift re-sorts the bar on its own.
• 24-hour times, with +1 / -1 against clocks on a different date to you.
• Labels to the left of each time. The centre clock is your local time and carries no label.
• Dimmed outside working hours, evaluated in each clock's own timezone (weekends included), so a glance tells you who is actually around.
• Seconds per clock. Any clock can show HH:MM:SS on its own, including your local one. The bar only drops to a per-second tick when something is actually displaying seconds.
• Themed. Colours, fonts, spacing and bar height all come from the active Omarchy theme; it follows a theme switch with no restart. Set your own bar height and the type and spacing scale with it.

Install

On any Omarchy 4 machine:

omarchy plugin add https://git.nerdnation.co.za/NerdNation/OmarchyClockBar.git --enable --yes

The plugin lands in ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/nerdnation.clockbar/, and ~/.config/omarchy/clockbar.json is seeded on first run.

To update it later, and to remove it:

omarchy plugin update nerdnation.clockbar && omarchy restart shell
omarchy plugin remove nerdnation.clockbar

The omarchy restart shell is not optional. omarchy plugin update pulls the new files and calls rescanPlugins, but that does not reload a keepLoaded panel plugin: the shell holds the compiled QML it started with, so the files on disk change and the bar carries on running the old build. It looks exactly like the update silently failing. Restarting the shell is what actually applies it.

Plugins run as unsandboxed QML inside omarchy-shell, so omarchy plugin add clones disabled by default and wants you to read the code first. --enable skips that.

Configuring it

Two routes, one source of truth — both read and write ~/.config/omarchy/clockbar.json, and the bar reloads from the file either way.

Click the bar. Opens an editor with a searchable timezone picker: add, rename, retime and remove clocks, set seconds per clock, and set the working-hours window and bar height. Each row shows that zone's current offset so you can see the effect before saving.

The picker searches country names as well as zone names, so you can find a zone without knowing it is named after a city — typing Ghana finds Africa/Accra. Country data is tzdata's own (zone1970.tab, zone.tab, iso3166.tab); the legacy alias zones tzdata ships as hard links inherit the countries of the canonical zone they point at.

Edit the file. It hot-reloads on save, no restart:

{
  "version": 1,
  "clocks": [
    { "label": "LA",  "timezone": "America/Los_Angeles" },
    { "label": "NYC", "timezone": "America/New_York" },
    { "label": "SG",  "timezone": "Asia/Singapore" },
    { "label": "AUS", "timezone": "Australia/Sydney" },
    { "label": "NZ",  "timezone": "Pacific/Auckland", "showSeconds": true }
  ],
  "workingHours": { "start": 8, "end": 18, "workdays": [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] },
  "dimOutsideWorkingHours": true,
  "showSeconds": false,
  "local": { "showSeconds": false },
  "barSize": 0
}

Key	Meaning
clocks[].label	Shown left of the time. Defaults to the last part of the zone name.
clocks[].timezone	Any IANA zone (timedatectl list-timezones).
clocks[].showSeconds	Seconds on this clock. Omit it to inherit the bar-wide default below.
workingHours.start / .end	Hours, 0–24, in each clock's own zone. A window that wraps midnight (22–6) is understood.
workingHours.workdays	Days counted as working. 0 = Sunday.
dimOutsideWorkingHours	Mute clocks outside that window.
showSeconds	The bar-wide default for seconds, for clocks that do not set their own.
local.showSeconds	Seconds on your local clock, which has no entry in clocks[].
barSize	Bar height in px. 0 follows the theme's. Otherwise 12–120; text and spacing scale with it.

Seconds resolve per clock: a clock's own showSeconds wins, otherwise the bar-wide default applies. An explicit false on a clock beats a true default. The bar ticks once a minute unless something on it is showing seconds — nothing pays for a per-second redraw it does not use.

There is no left / right setting: which side a clock lands on is a fact about its offset, not a preference.

When something is wrong, the bar says so rather than lying. A zone tzdata cannot resolve renders as LABEL --:-- in the theme's urgent colour instead of silently falling back to UTC. A clockbar.json that will not parse turns the bar's top hairline red and puts config error beside your local time, while the last good config keeps ticking — and the broken file is never overwritten.

IPC

omarchy-shell nerdnation.clockbar edit      # open the editor
omarchy-shell nerdnation.clockbar toggle
omarchy-shell nerdnation.clockbar refresh   # re-probe timezone offsets
omarchy-shell nerdnation.clockbar reload    # re-read clockbar.json

Bind the editor to a key in ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua if you want one.

How it works, and why

Qt's QML engine ships no Intl, so there is no way to render an IANA timezone from inside QML — the usual Intl.DateTimeFormat({ timeZone }) route does not exist. Rather than bundle a copy of the tz database, the plugin asks the system's own tzdata for each zone's current UTC offset (TZ=<zone> date +%z) and then does the arithmetic itself. That keeps it correct across DST changes and tzdata updates without knowing any of the rules.

The probe is one short-lived shell, and its answer stays valid until a transition, so it runs on a slow timer — every ten minutes, on each hour boundary (where transitions land), and whenever the config changes. In between, the clocks advance by arithmetic on the minute tick.

ClockModel.js holds all of that logic and touches no QML types, so it runs unchanged under node:

node tests/model.test.js

Layout

File	Role
manifest.json	Plugin manifest — kind: panel, keepLoaded
Clockbar.qml	Entry point: the bottom layer-shell surface, one per screen
Editor.qml	The click-to-edit popup
Config.qml	clockbar.json — read, watch, write
Zones.qml	Timezone offset probe and the zone list for the picker
ClockModel.js	Ordering, formatting, day offsets, working hours (pure JS)
tests/model.test.js	Unit tests for the above