How to set up Walkie on Omarchy

This page covers Omarchy specifically. For Arch without Omarchy, Debian, or any other distro, see Walkie on Linux — the install is the same, but the keybinding and bar steps below are Omarchy's own and will not apply.

Setup at a glance

1. 1
   Add Walkie's pacman repository and install walkie-bin.Updates then ride pacman -Syu like any other package.
2. 2
   Bind a key in ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua, then run hyprctl reload.Wayland cannot let Walkie register its own hotkey, so Hyprland holds the key and runs a Walkie command on press and release.
3. 3
   Hold the key, say a sentence, and release.The text is typed into whatever app has focus. Everything after this — the bar widget, meeting audio, autostart — is optional.

Install Walkie

Walkie ships its own pacman repository, so updates ride pacman -Syu like everything else on the system. Add it to /etc/pacman.conf once:

# /etc/pacman.conf
[walkie]
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll
Server = https://b150.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/walkie/arch/$arch

Then install:

sudo pacman -Syu walkie-bin

The package pulls in the optional pieces Walkie needs as optdepends — wtype for typing text, wl-clipboard for the clipboard path, and the PipeWire packages for meeting audio. Omarchy already installs wtype and PipeWire as part of its base system, so on a stock install there is usually nothing more to add.

Bind a key for dictation

Wayland has no protocol that lets an application listen for a global keyboard shortcut, so Walkie's in-app shortcut setting cannot see your keypress. The compositor holds the key instead and runs a Walkie command when it goes down and up. This is the same approach Omarchy uses for its own Voxtype dictation.

Omarchy configures Hyprland through Lua, and your bindings belong in the user-owned file ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua:

if o.cmd_present("walkie") then
  o.bind("SUPER + CTRL + X", "Toggle Walkie dictation", "walkie --toggle-transcription")
  o.bind("F9", "Walkie push-to-talk (start)", "walkie --start-transcription")
  o.bind("F9", "Walkie push-to-talk (stop)", "walkie --stop-transcription", { release = true })
  o.bind("SUPER + CTRL + ESCAPE", "Cancel Walkie", "walkie --cancel")
end

Then reload the compositor:

hyprctl reload

If you also use Voxtype

Omarchy's Voxtype bindings live in default/hypr/bindings/voxtype.lua, which Omarchy owns and will overwrite on upgrade — so rebind Walkie in your own bindings.lua rather than editing Voxtype's file. Any free combination works:

o.bind("SUPER + CTRL + D", "Toggle Walkie dictation", "walkie --toggle-transcription")
o.bind("F10", "Walkie push-to-talk (start)", "walkie --start-transcription")
o.bind("F10", "Walkie push-to-talk (stop)", "walkie --stop-transcription", { release = true })

If you would rather remove Voxtype and use the keys as written, sudo pacman -R voxtype-bin and drop its binding file.

Add the Walkie bar widget

Walkie can live in your Omarchy bar: it shows whether Walkie is idle, recording, transcribing or in a meeting, and clicking it starts dictation without touching the keyboard. The walkie-bin package ships the widget at /usr/share/walkie/omarchy-plugin/.

1. 1
   Copy the widget into your Omarchy plugins directory.The directory name has to match the plugin id, com.b150.walkie.
2. 2
   Enable it and pick which side of the bar it sits on.--section takes left, center or right.

mkdir -p ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/com.b150.walkie
cp /usr/share/walkie/omarchy-plugin/{manifest.json,BarWidget.qml} \
   ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/com.b150.walkie/
omarchy plugin enable com.b150.walkie --section right

The icon breathes while the microphone is open, dims when idle, and fades further when Walkie is not running.

Widget settings

Edit the widget's entry in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json, or set them from the command line with omarchy bar set com.b150.walkie <key> <value>:

Using another bar

The widget is a thin wrapper around a command any bar can call. walkie status prints one line of Waybar-shaped JSON and exits; walkie status --watch streams a line every time the state changes.

{"text":"<glyph>","alt":"recording","class":"recording","tooltip":"Walkie — recording"}

class carries the state: idle, recording, analyzing, transcribing, thinking, speaking, error, meeting, meeting_paused, or stopped when Walkie is not running. text is a Nerd Font glyph you can ignore in favour of your own. For Waybar:

"custom/walkie": {
  "exec": "walkie status --watch",
  "return-type": "json",
  "format": "{}",
  "tooltip": true,
  "on-click": "walkie --toggle-transcription"
}

Meeting audio

To record the other side of a call, Walkie reads your speakers' monitor source through PipeWire's PulseAudio layer. Omarchy ships PipeWire, but confirm these are present:

sudo pacman -S pipewire-pulse libpulse pipewire-alsa

• pipewire-pulse and libpulse provide parec and the monitor source Walkie records from.
• pipewire-alsa is what lets your microphone work at all — without it, recording fails with a device error.

Start Walkie on login

Hyprland ignores the XDG autostart entry Walkie writes, so use the systemd user service instead. The package installs the unit; enable it once:

systemctl --user enable --now walkie

Or, if you would rather keep it in your compositor config:

exec-once = walkie --start-hidden

Check it works

1. 1
   Confirm Walkie is running and reachable.walkie status should print idle rather than stopped.
2. 2
   Hold your push-to-talk key, say a sentence, and release.Try it in a terminal first, then in a browser field — text injection can differ between the two.
3. 3
   Check the bar widget changes state while you hold the key.

Known limitations on Omarchy

• The recording overlay is off by default. Some compositors treat it as the focused window, which stops Walkie pasting back into the app you were typing in. You can turn it on in Settings if yours behaves.
• Builds are unsigned, and the pacman repository is unsigned too.
• Read Aloud's text capture is limited on Wayland. Reading a selection from another app does not work on every compositor yet; dropping a file onto Walkie always does.
• The bar widget needs a recent Walkie build — the one that added the walkie status command. Against an older build the widget simply shows "not running".