Switchyard

Switchyard is an Omarchy shell plugin that opens the sites you choose as web apps: a clicked link to a matching site opens in its own window, with no address bar and no tabs, exactly like an app you installed yourself. Everything else opens in your regular browser. Sending a chosen site to a different browser instead — Chromium for a Google Meet link, say — is the second thing it does, not the point of it.

What it is

Switchyard is a plugin for the Omarchy shell. Once installed, it registers itself as your system's link handler for http and https links, so every link you click anywhere on the system passes through it first, whether it came from a terminal, a chat app, or an email.

How it works

You give Switchyard a short list of host rules: a domain, written as *.domain to cover every subdomain too, paired with where links to it should go. Switchyard checks each clicked link's host against your rules in order and uses the first one that matches. A rule's target is either another browser or the special target webapp, which opens the link as a web app window instead of a normal browser tab. A link that matches nothing goes to your fallback browser — the browser you were already using as your default before Switchyard took over, so nothing changes until you ask it to. Running activate records that fallback and makes Switchyard the system default; deactivate restores your previous default browser and leaves your rules in place. Switchyard never swallows a link it can't route: anything it can't match, or any link clicked without a browser specified, still opens somewhere, in the fallback.

The idea behind it

Many Omarchy users run a non-Chromium browser like Zen or Firefox as their default, for the reasons people usually pick one: privacy, speed, or just preference. But a handful of sites, or any app that is Chromium-only, work better — or only work at all — as a Chromium web app: a window with no address bar or tabs, launched straight to that one site. Switching browsers by hand for those few cases, every time, is the kind of friction that adds up over a day. Switchyard removes it: set the rule once, and the right sites always open the right way, without ever showing you a picker.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/klipa-dev/omarchy-switchyard.git --enable
~/.config/omarchy/plugins/klipa.switchyard/bin/omarchy-switchyard activate

Rules live in ~/.config/omarchy-switchyard/rules.json:

{
  "version": 1,
  "rules": [
    { "host": "*.google.com", "target": "chromium.desktop" },
    { "host": "basecamp.com", "target": "webapp" },
    { "host": "github.com", "target": "zen.desktop" }
  ]
}

See the Switchyard repo for the full README, the command-line tool, and the settings panel.