nixarchy.podman — Podman in the Omarchy shell, on the bar and on a key

Podman for the Omarchy shell on nixarchy: your containers, images, volumes and networks on the bar and on a key.

The full-screen menu, driven from the keyboard: j to a container, enter to stop it, and it drops to the bottom as it stops.

Who it is for

You run containers with rootless Podman on an Omarchy desktop: a database for the project you are on, a few services you started last month, and images you pulled once and forgot. You would rather glance at your bar than type podman ps -a.

The problem

Four questions come up all the time: What is running? What is broken? What is eating my disk? Is it safe to delete? Each needs its own command, and they don’t talk to each other:

podman ps -a            # what is running, what exited
podman images           # what is taking space
podman volume ls        # which of these is still attached to anything?
podman system df -v     # how much would I get back?
podman volume prune     # and this one you cannot take back

So you run them in a terminal, read the output side by side, and either decide it is not worth the risk or delete something you needed.

What it does

One glyph in the bar tells you the state at a glance. It is dim when nothing runs, bright when something does, and red when a running container is unhealthy or stuck restarting.

The glyph, enlarged: dim (nothing running), accent (running), red (a running container is unhealthy or restarting).

Four tabs answer the four questions. Containers are grouped by Compose project, running first, with live CPU and memory. Images, volumes and networks are each split into Unused and In use, biggest first, and the footer says how much you would get back.

Every action is a key. Start, stop and restart. Follow the logs, or open a shell inside a container. Copy a name or an id. Remove one thing, or prune a whole tab.

There are two ways in. Click the glyph for a popup under it, or press Super+Alt+O (or pick Podman in the Omarchy menu) for a larger full-screen view. The full-screen view holds the keyboard until you are done, and does not need the widget to be in the bar at all.

The full-screen menu over your desktop: the same tabs, drawn larger, holding the keyboard.

From the Omarchy menu: search podman, pick Podman.

How it works

Podman decides, not the plugin. What counts as unused, how much a volume takes and what a prune would remove all come from Podman’s own answers. So the Unused list is exactly what prune would take.
Nothing irreversible happens by accident. x and p always ask first, say what is about to go, and have Cancel selected.
When Podman says no, you see why. Podman refuses plenty of reasonable-looking requests: a volume still mounted, an image still in use. Its own reason appears under the list, verbatim.
It stays out of the way. A closed surface does nothing. The only background work is a slow check that keeps the glyph honest.

Remove confirmation — `x` asks, names the item, and has Cancel selected.

Prune confirmation — `p` names what it will take, and has Cancel selected.

Podman refusing to remove an image in use — Removing an image a container still uses: the question warns Podman will refuse, and when it does, its own reason is shown.

Why it is built this way

Podman’s judgment, not a guess. A tool that re-implements “unused” gets it wrong eventually, and for a delete key, wrong is expensive.
Keyboard first. Omarchy is a keyboard desktop, and a container manager you have to reach for the mouse to use would not get used. Every surface, tab, row and action has a key; press ? for all of them.
No daemon, no wrapper. It runs podman from your PATH, rootless, as you. There is nothing extra to keep running or to trust.
Installed like the rest of nixarchy. It is a flake. Your system configuration says it is there, and a rebuild puts it there.

A tour

The bar popup: the cursor, a filter, jumping to Networks and back, and the shortcut sheet.

Filtering — `/` filters the tab as you type.

Logs in a terminal — `o` follows a container's logs in a terminal. Here, why the migration job failed.

A shell inside a container — `s` opens a shell inside a running container.

The Omarchy menu row — The **Podman** row in the Omarchy menu, from `share/omarchy-menu.jsonc`.

Install

On NixOS with nixarchy, add the flake and install the plugin next to programs.nixarchy.enable:

inputs.nixarchy-podman = {
  url = "github:olafkfreund/nixarchy-podman";
  inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
};

programs.nixarchy.plugins."nixarchy.podman".src =
  inputs.nixarchy-podman.packages.${pkgs.stdenv.hostPlatform.system}.default;
virtualisation.podman.enable = true;

Rebuild, then enable it once:

omarchy plugin enable nixarchy.podman

Without Nix: omarchy plugin add https://github.com/olafkfreund/nixarchy-podman, then the same enable.

Read the manual for the Omarchy menu row, the key binding, settings, troubleshooting and removal. The source is at github.com/olafkfreund/nixarchy-podman.

Every image on this page is the real plugin on a real machine, driven from the keyboard. It was captured with throwaway demo-* containers, volumes and networks, which were removed afterwards. Nothing else on the machine was changed.