Omawrite

A dead-simple Markdown writing app built with Qt Quick and C++ that automatically follows system dark/light mode.

This is a fork. omacom/omawrite is deliberately minimal and stays that way on purpose. This branch takes 21 of its open pull requests, so it has tabs, a file sidebar, a preview that renders local images, wikilinks, checkboxes and focus mode.

The rest is written here, because nobody had built it: pasting an image, copy on select, wrapping and unwrapping Markdown at 80 columns, a command line that reaches the running window over D-Bus, and Claude in a panel beside the document with a conversation per file that survives a restart.

137 tests. Merging those pull requests meant reconciling contributors' designs rather than resolving conflict markers, and docs/DECISIONS.md records the calls that are not obvious from the diff. docs/STATUS.md says what was taken, what was left, and why, and docs/AGENT.md covers the panel.

Install

Install via the Omarchy Package Repository via the omawrite package. It's installed by default in new installations of Omarchy (from Quattro forward).

Command line

omawrite [FILE]              open a window, on FILE when there is one
omawrite --open FILE[:LINE]  show FILE in the window already on screen
omawrite --open FILE --tab   open it beside what is showing, not over it
omawrite --append FILE       add stdin to the end of FILE, no window
omawrite --list-tabs         print what the last session left open
omawrite --tabs [--json]     print what the running window has open now
omawrite --read [TAB]        print a tab's text as the editor holds it
omawrite --select TAB        bring a tab forward, and its window with it
omawrite --help              print the usage and exit

--open goes over the session bus, so it reaches the Omawrite already running instead of starting a second one beside it — a script that shows a file five times leaves five tabs at most, never five windows. It returns as soon as the window has the file, so it does not block a shell:

omawrite --open notes/standup.md:12

--append and --list-tabs answer before Qt claims the terminal, so they work over ssh with no desktop session and with nothing running. Appending writes the file directly; an Omawrite holding that file notices through the watcher it already has:

date -u +%F | omawrite --append notes/log.md

--tabs, --read and --select go over the same bus, and they are how an agent or a script works on a document while you have it open in front of you. --tabs numbers every tab across every window and marks the one showing. --read prints that tab's text as the editor holds it, which the session file is up to an autosave behind. --select moves the editor onto a tab. All three name a tab the same way: the number --tabs printed, a path, a file name, or nothing for the tab in front.

omawrite --tabs
omawrite --read standup.md > /tmp/draft.md
omawrite --select 2

This is mostly for coding agents. Ask one to open a file in Omawrite and it runs omawrite --help first to work out how, so the help has to answer in the terminal, and it has to say that a plain omawrite FILE stays up until the window is closed while --open does not.

Shortcuts

• Ctrl+S saves, though writing is saved for you anyway. Naming a document yourself uses the XDG desktop portal file picker.
• Ctrl+Shift+S saves as.
• Ctrl+O opens a Markdown file through the portal picker.
• Ctrl+P opens the system print dialog.
• Ctrl+E shows the sidebar listing the Markdown in the current document's folder, and puts the keyboard in it. Pressing it again takes the sidebar away and hands the keyboard back to the text — it never reaches into the panel while you are writing. It starts closed.
• Ctrl+Shift+P toggles the Markdown preview. It is drawn in the same font as the source view, at the same size, with headings on the same ratios, so switching between the two changes what is rendered and nothing else. HTML in the file is not rendered: the preview shows its tags as text, and the status line says so.
• Alt+G opens the Claude panel on the right of the window, and closes it again. Ctrl+Shift+A copies the whole conversation, which copy in the panel's header also does. See Claude beside the document.
• Ctrl+T opens a tab, Ctrl+W closes the one in front, and Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab move between them. Ctrl+Shift+PgUp and Ctrl+Shift+PgDown move a tab along the strip. Tabs come back where you left them when Omawrite starts, and the strip only appears once there are two.
• Ctrl+N opens a new Omawrite window.
• Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Shift+Z, and Ctrl+Y handle undo and redo.
• Super+F toggles fullscreen. Qt maps this key as Meta+F.
• Ctrl+F searches the document. Use Enter or Ctrl+G for the next match and Shift+Enter for the previous match.
• Ctrl+H opens find and replace.
• Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I, and Ctrl+Shift+X toggle bold, italic, and strikethrough Markdown. Ctrl+K inserts a link.
• Ctrl+L turns a list item into a checkbox, and ticks or unticks one that already is. Clicking the box does the same.
• Tab and Shift+Tab nest and unnest list items. Bullets and numbers line up under the item above them, and ordered lists renumber themselves.
• Ctrl+Click or Ctrl+Enter follows a link: Obsidian [[wikilinks]] open the note in Omawrite, https:// and markdown [text](url) links open in the browser.
• Hovering a link names its destination above the footer, so you can read where it goes before deciding to follow it.
• Selecting with the mouse copies. Let go of the drag and what was highlighted is on the clipboard, the way a terminal does it, and the footer says how many characters for a moment. It works in the document, the preview and the Claude panel. Ctrl+Shift+C turns it off and on everywhere at once, and it stays as you left it.
• Ctrl+J wraps Markdown at 80 columns — the convention most Markdown files are held to. It reflows rather than folds: lines already broken somewhere else are joined first, so a file wrapped at 72 comes out at 80 instead of 72 with the overhang tucked underneath. Headings, tables, fenced and indented code, front matter and thematic breaks keep their own line breaks, list items hang their continuations, quotes carry their marker down, and a word longer than the measure goes on a line of its own rather than being cut in half. Set wrapColumns under [layout] for a different measure. With a selection it takes the selected lines, without one the whole document, and Ctrl+Z puts it back in a single step.
• Ctrl+Shift+J unwraps hard-wrapped lines: text pasted out of a mail client or a file wrapped at 72 columns goes back to one line per paragraph. It leaves blank lines, list items, table rows, headings, fenced and indented code, front matter and Markdown's own two-space line break where they are. With a selection it takes the selected lines, without one the whole document, and Ctrl+Z puts it back in a single step.
• Ctrl+V pastes an image from the clipboard: it is written to an images folder beside the document and referred to by a relative path, which the preview renders.
• Ctrl++ and Ctrl+- adjust the editor text size. Ctrl+= also increases it, and Ctrl+0 resets it to the original size.
• Ctrl+Shift+T toggles focus mode: typewriter scrolling and paragraph dimming.
• Ctrl+/ shows the keyboard shortcut reference. Ctrl+? does the same, for anyone whose fingers already know it.

Sidebar

The sidebar lists the folder the open document lives in — Markdown files and the folders beside them, nothing else. Opening a document puts the cursor after everything already written in it, so writing carries on with the sidebar still open, and the document you are leaving is saved on the way out rather than asked about.

With the keyboard, once Ctrl+E has put focus there:

• Up/Down or j/k move through the folder.
• Enter, Right, or l opens a document and hands the keyboard back to the text, or walks into a folder and stays put.
• Backspace, Left, or h goes up a level.
• a starts a new Markdown file and A a new folder; type the name and press Enter, or Esc to abandon it. A new document opens straight away, and an existing name is reported rather than overwritten.
• Esc returns to writing, leaving the sidebar open.

The folder is re-read whenever anything in it changes, and the selection keeps its place through that rather than snapping back to the top. Opening the panel starts from the document being written.

Drag its right edge to widen it; the width is remembered, and stops short of squeezing the writing column below its usual measure.

Claude panel

Alt+G, or the robot button at the top right of the window, opens a dock on the right and asks Claude there rather than in a terminal in the next tile. It knows which document is open, where the caret is and what is selected, and the turn runs in the folder the document lives in, so the notes beside it can be read without naming a path. Answers stream in as they are written. A line above the input says what the turn is doing and for how long, and Escape or stop ends it.

Each document keeps its own conversation, across tab switches and across restarts, until you clear it with new. It drives the claude command line non-interactively in acceptEdits: Claude edits files without asking, and refuses anything that would otherwise need a prompt, since nothing headless can answer one. allowedTools under [agent] names the commands it may run anyway, and permissionMode=bypassPermissions lifts the question entirely. docs/AGENT.md covers what it is told, what it runs, how an edit it makes reaches the editor, and what has not been built yet.

Font

The window is drawn in the desktop's own monospace font — JetBrainsMono Nerd Font where Omarchy has installed it — at 12px, document and Claude panel alike. A machine without it falls back to the bundled iA Writer Mono S. Ctrl++ and Ctrl+- change the document's size and remember it; Ctrl+0 goes back to 12.

Measure

The writing column fills the window, keeping ten characters of margin on either side, and gives way as the sidebar and the Claude panel take their width. To fix it at a measure instead, set editorColumns under [layout] in ~/.config/Omacom/omawrite.conf — any width from 20 characters up. 65 is what Omawrite used to be. An install still carrying that old default is moved to the filling measure once; a measure you chose yourself is left alone.

Saving

Writing is saved a moment after you stop typing, and again whenever you leave the document — switching files, closing the window, or moving to another app. There is no prompt to answer and nothing to remember to press; Ctrl+Z is the way back rather than a discard button.

A document you never named takes its name from its first line when you leave it, landing in the folder the sidebar is showing; if the same name is taken already it becomes ... 2. One with nothing written in it is not kept.

Unsaved drafts are recovered after an abnormal exit. Omawrite also watches open files and warns before an external change can replace local work.

Text follows the desktop text size — omarchy display text size, or GNOME's text-scaling-factor — and re-flows without a restart. The default of 12px leaves Omawrite at the size it is designed around; larger and smaller sizes scale from there. Editor text size starts at 20px, changes in 2px steps from 10px to 48px, and is remembered across launches. Desktop text scaling is applied on top of this base size.

Requirements

• Qt 6.5 or newer: qt6-base, qt6-declarative, qt6-quickcontrols2
• xdg-desktop-portal and a portal backend
• Optional: claude on your PATH for the Claude panel (claude-code in the Omarchy package repository). Everything else works without it.

The iA Writer Mono font is bundled under the SIL Open Font License 1.1; see fonts/OFL.txt. The font is copyright Information Architects Inc. and based on IBM Plex, copyright IBM Corp.