Omarchy 4.5 Cuts the Menu’s Slowest Checks From 200 ms to 16 ms

Every time the Omarchy menu opens it runs a batch of small “guards” to decide what to show. In 4.5, DHH made the three slowest ones nearly free. The release notes say 200 ms down to 16 ms.

• Hybrid GPU: 70-120 ms to 2 ms by counting PCI display controllers in sysfs instead of calling lspci. Bonus: lspci was waking a sleeping discrete GPU on every menu open.
• Touchpad: 25 ms to 11 ms by matching names first and only asking udev about candidates.
• Wi-Fi QR code: 65 ms to 3 ms with a new hidden omarchy-network-wifi-connected that uses ip route, sysfs and busctl instead of nmcli and iw.

Fair warning from the PR itself: the full guard batch went from about 410 ms to 256 ms on one Strix Halo box, so the menu doesn’t open in 16 ms. The win is a shorter window where a row can show stale info.

My take

This is my favorite kind of optimization: read sysfs, stop forking tools you don’t need. Not waking the dGPU matters for laptop battery too. I wrote up a quick how-to for timing your own scripts the same way.

God Bless, and Use the Source!

References & Further Reading

• Omarchy 4.5 cuts the menu’s slowest checks from 200 ms to 16 ms (Omarchy Central)
• Omarchy on GitHub