Presenter Overlay for Omarchy

Draw on your screen, spotlight your cursor, and highlight your clicks — a shell overlay built for demos, screencasts and screen sharing.

Click the pencil in your bar, and the whole screen becomes a whiteboard on top of whatever you are presenting. Circle the button you are talking about, drop an arrow on it, dim everything but the spot you want people looking at — then hit Exit and it is all gone.

Features

• A button in your bar — left click draws, right click spotlights, middle click wipes the last drawing. No keybinding to set up and nothing to memorise; bind a hotkey later only if you want one.

• Annotate anything — freehand pen, arrows and rectangles, drawn straight over your desktop, browser, terminal or slides.

• Four theme-aware pens — the colors come from the active Omarchy theme (accent, urgent, foreground, muted), so the overlay never clashes with it.

• Spotlight — dim the screen except a circle around the pointer, sized with the scroll wheel.

• Click ripples — an expanding ring at every click, so a recording shows where you actually clicked.

• Undo / redo / clear — including right-click to undo without moving your hand off the mouse.

• Toolbar you can hide — every piece of state is visible at the bottom of the screen and clickable, and T hides it for a clean recording.

  

• Built-in cheat sheet — ? at any time; it also shows itself the first time you open the overlay.

  

Requirements

• Omarchy 4 (Quattro) or newer, running omarchy-shell.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/andreas-bylund/presenter-overlay.git --enable

That clones the plugin into ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/bylund.presenter-overlay/ and enables it. The shell picks it up without a restart.

To remove it again:

omarchy plugin disable bylund.presenter-overlay
omarchy plugin remove bylund.presenter-overlay

The bar button

Presenter Overlay installs as two things at once: the overlay itself, and a pencil button for your bar. Enabling the plugin puts the button on the right of the bar; drag it wherever you like, or place it explicitly:

omarchy plugin enable bylund.presenter-overlay left --after omarchy.workspaces

Click	What happens
Left	Opens the overlay with the pen selected
Right	Opens it with the spotlight on
Middle	Clears the annotations without opening anything

The button turns your theme's urgent color while the overlay is up.

Because the overlay covers the whole screen — the bar included — the button cannot be clicked a second time to put it away. Use Hide in the overlay's own toolbar to park the drawing so the same button brings it back, or Exit (Esc) to throw it away.

Set up a keybinding (optional)

The bar button is the whole interface, but a hotkey is faster mid-demo. Presenter Overlay ships none of its own, so bind it wherever it fits your muscle memory.

Omarchy 4 configures Hyprland through Lua. Add this to ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua:

o.bind("SUPER + ALT + D", "Draw on screen", "omarchy-shell shell toggle bylund.presenter-overlay")
o.bind("SUPER + ALT + P", "Spotlight cursor", [[omarchy-shell shell summon bylund.presenter-overlay '{"mode":"spotlight"}']])

On an older setup that still reads ~/.config/hypr/bindings.conf, plain Hyprland syntax works too:

bind = SUPER ALT, D, exec, omarchy-shell shell toggle bylund.presenter-overlay

Both of those are free on a stock Omarchy install. Watch out for the neighbours if you pick your own: SUPER + SHIFT + D opens Docker, and SUPER + ALT + S moves a window to the scratchpad.

Keymap

Key	Action
Drag	Draw with the current tool
D / A / R	Pen · arrow · rectangle
1 – 4	Pen color: accent, urgent, foreground, muted
+ / - (or ] / [)	Thicker / thinner pen
Wheel	Pen thickness — or spotlight size while the spotlight is on
Shift+Wheel	Pen thickness, always
U or right-click	Undo the last stroke
Ctrl+Y (or Ctrl+Shift+Z)	Redo
C	Clear all annotations
S	Toggle the spotlight
P	Toggle click ripples
T	Toggle the toolbar
? / F1 / H	Cheat sheet
Esc	Clear everything and close

Every one of these has a chip in the toolbar too, plus two that are mouse-only: Hide and Exit.

Hiding the overlay — the Hide chip, the bar button, or your hotkey — keeps the drawing, so you can bring the same annotations back. Exit / Esc is the one that throws it away.

Summon payloads

summon and toggle accept an optional JSON payload, which is how you bind more than one entry point to the same overlay:

{
  "mode": "spotlight", // "draw" (default) or "spotlight" — spotlight also turns on ripples
  "tool": "arrow"      // "pen" (default), "arrow" or "rect"
}

omarchy-shell shell summon bylund.presenter-overlay '{"mode":"spotlight"}'
omarchy-shell shell summon bylund.presenter-overlay '{"tool":"arrow"}'

Sending a payload to an overlay that is already open switches mode without touching what you have already drawn.

Scripting it

A few actions are callable from the outside while the overlay is loaded, which is useful for stream-deck style bindings:

omarchy-shell shell call bylund.presenter-overlay toggleSpotlight ""
omarchy-shell shell call bylund.presenter-overlay toggleRipples ""
omarchy-shell shell call bylund.presenter-overlay clearAnnotations ""
omarchy-shell shell call bylund.presenter-overlay setTool arrow

Theming

Presenter Overlay hardcodes no colors. Pens, scrim, toolbar and cheat sheet all read the Color and Style singletons the rest of the shell uses, so switching your Omarchy theme restyles the overlay with it. The four pens map to the foundational theme roles — a theme with a strong accent gets a pen to match.

Strokes remember the color they were drawn in, so a theme switch mid-session leaves existing annotations alone.

Known limitations

• One screen at a time. The overlay is a single layer-shell surface, so on a multi-monitor setup it covers the screen the compositor puts it on.
• Click ripples only show clicks on the overlay. While Presenter Overlay is open it takes keyboard and pointer input, so the apps underneath do not receive clicks. A global click visualizer that keeps working while you use your apps would need a separate input-listening service.
• The cheat sheet's "first run" is per shell session. It reappears after omarchy-shell restarts rather than being remembered on disk.

Development

Plugins are discovered in ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/<id>/ and hot-reload when a file is saved.

That covers the bar widget, which picks up an edit within a second or two. It does not cover the overlay: keepLoaded: true keeps its component mounted for the whole shell session, so the watcher logs the reload but the running overlay keeps the code it started with. Editing anything the overlay draws means omarchy-restart-shell.

Clone straight into the plugin directory. Do not develop in a checkout elsewhere and symlink it in: the plugin loads fine that way, but the shell's file watcher does not follow the symlink, so nothing hot-reloads and every edit needs a restart to show up.

git clone https://github.com/andreas-bylund/presenter-overlay.git \
  ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/bylund.presenter-overlay
omarchy plugin enable bylund.presenter-overlay

# Check the manifest against the same rules the shell enforces
omarchy plugin validate ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/bylund.presenter-overlay

# Toggle it
omarchy-shell shell toggle bylund.presenter-overlay

If you want it alongside your other projects, point the symlink the other way — the real files stay where the watcher can see them:

ln -s ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/bylund.presenter-overlay ~/Projects/presenter-overlay

Load errors show up on the omarchy-shell console as panel plugin bylund.presenter-overlay failed to load: …, and widget errors as Plugin widget bylund.presenter-overlay failed: …. Read them with:

journalctl --user --since -5min | grep presenter-overlay

Hot-reload handles edits to a file, but replacing the plugin directory itself — or changing kinds in the manifest — can leave Qt holding a stale compiled component, which surfaces as a bogus File name case mismatch. Restart the shell to clear it:

omarchy-restart-shell

Layout:

manifest.json                  Plugin manifest (schemaVersion 1, kinds
                               "overlay" + "bar-widget")
PresenterOverlay.qml           Overlay entry point: window, state, key routing
PresenterOverlayWidget.qml     Bar entry point: the pencil button
components/DrawLayer.qml       Stroke model and the two drawing canvases
components/SpotlightLayer.qml
components/ClickRipples.qml
components/Toolbar.qml         Bottom pill
components/ToolbarChip.qml
components/HelpOverlay.qml     Cheat sheet

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Keep QML in the style of the surrounding code and of the Omarchy shell itself: two-space indent, no semicolons, theme tokens instead of literal colors.

License

MIT © Andreas Bylund