Set default terminal application in Omarchy
I recently installed Omarchy on my trusty old 2011 MacBook Pro. After a snappy seven minute installation…I was unable to do anything ☹️
Unfortunately there are issues with these older machines and their dual-GPU(?) setups that prevent OpenGL from working properly. Ghostty (the default terminal application in Omarchy) is a GPU-Accelerated TTY application. This is awesome when it works, but in my specific case was a showstopper. Since the majority of Omarchy is built around TUI applications, they all open via Ghostty which has some known issues in some machines.
The obvious solution is to install a non-GPU-accelerated terminal like Alacritty. However, without a working terminal application how was I supposed to install it? Then I would need to set the default terminal to be Alacritty rather than Ghostty.
Installing Alacritty Without a Working Ghostty installation
After some internet sleuthing + consulting AI, I learned that Wayland desktops have a nifty key command: ctrl + alt + f3 (or f4) to hop into a dedicated TTY instance “underneath” the UI. By accessing this, I was quickly able to install Alacritty via pacman -S alacritty. Easy enough! (Note: I did have to run impala and connect to my wireless this way first. Can’t install without a network connection!)
Setting Alacritty as the Default Terminal Application
At this point I could return to the main Hyprland UI and boot up Alacritty -> nvim to start messing with the ~/.config files. But which one? I found this commit in the Omarchy repo, which includes the xdg-terminals.list file. BINGO! Simply adding Alacritty.desktop above the Ghostty spec ensures that Super + Enter kicks off alacritty, and all the TUIs (such as Impala, for network management) become available.