LichArch: nine standalone installers for a KDE Plasma 6 desktop

Decoupled installers, and a master launcher on top

LichArch is a dotfile suite for Arch Linux and KDE Plasma 6, and its central design choice is that nothing is coupled. Every installer script is standalone and lives in scripts/, and you can either run the master interactive launcher or call the individual modules directly.

git clone https://github.com/AhmadHassan-BTed/LichArch.git
cd LichArch

# Option 1: Master Launcher (Interactive / CLI Flags)
./install.sh

The master launcher offers interactive mode and CLI flags, so a scripted setup and a guided one come from the same entry point. The alternative is to pick modules by hand, and the README lists them:

./scripts/setup-touchpad.sh   # Touchpad & Mouse Gestures Only (Live YAML Parser)
./scripts/setup-bin.sh        # Custom OCR Tool & Keybinding (Meta + Shift + T)
./scripts/setup-colors.sh     # Plasma Color Schemes & Desktop Themes
./scripts/setup-kwin.sh       # KWin Compositor, Tiling & Shortcuts

There are more of them, covering Konsole profiles, the Rofi launcher theme, application configs, system info tools and the shell profile.

That decoupling is the part that makes the repository usable rather than a curiosity. A dotfile repository that is one big script is a repository you either adopt whole or not at all, and the usual outcome is that you cannot tell which change did what. Here, if you only want the OCR screenshot tool, you run one script and you know exactly what landed on your system.

The repository layout backs this up. The top level is small: .gitignore, README.md, configs/, docs/, install.sh and scripts/. All the actual content lives under configs/, and the modules reference specific paths in that directory, so you can read the exact file a script will copy before you run it.

The touchpad module uses native in-compositor gestures

The touchpad and mouse gesture module is the most technically interesting of the nine, and it takes a different route from the usual helper daemon approach.

Its configuration lives in configs/inputactions/config.yaml and configs/udev/71-touchpad.rules, and the module is described as native in-compositor Wayland gestures with live Python YAML parsing. The features are 3-finger workspace switching, pinch for an overview and grid, 4-finger track skip, and continuous volume control.

Native in-compositor matters because it means the gestures are handled by KWin itself rather than by a separate program interpreting hardware events and injecting synthesised ones. The difference is in latency and in reliability: there is no event translation in the middle, and no background process to keep alive. It also means the gestures only work under a Wayland session, which is consistent with the session being Wayland native.

The live Python YAML parsing is the other detail worth noting. The configuration is read as YAML at the time it is applied rather than being flattened into a binary form by the installer, which means the same source file is the file you edit when you want to change a gesture.

For tuning, the repository has a dedicated reference document, the Touchpad Gestures and Troubleshooting Guide under docs/, which the README points to for gesture tuning, volume step size tweaks and emergency recovery hotkeys. That last category is telling, because it implies the author has had sessions where the gesture configuration needed to be escaped from.

A custom OCR screenshot tool assembled from existing pieces

The second module installs a Wayland OCR screenshot tool bound to Meta+Shift+T, and the way it is built is the interesting part. The tool lives at configs/bin/ocr-screenshot with a desktop entry at configs/applications/net.local.ocr-screenshot.desktop, and it combines slurp, spectacle, tesseract and wl-copy.

That is four existing programs doing four jobs: slurp for the region selection, spectacle for the capture, tesseract for the optical character recognition, and wl-copy for putting the extracted text on the clipboard. The README describes the flow: pressing Meta+Shift+T opens region selection, performs recognition, and copies the extracted text directly to the system clipboard with notification feedback.

The notification is not decoration, it is the feedback loop, because OCR takes time and a keypress that appears to do nothing is indistinguishable from a broken binding.

This module is also the clearest example of why the decoupling matters. The tool is a small shell script plus a desktop file, it depends on four separate programs you may need to install first, and you can install it on its own without touching the themes, the tiling configuration or the terminal profiles. If you are on Plasma and want select-and-copy text from the screen, this is a piece you can take and leave.

Four colour schemes, four Plasma themes, and a matching KWin setup

The visual configuration is split across two modules, and it is worth separating them because they do different jobs.

The colour and desktop theme module reads from configs/plasma/color-schemes/, desktoptheme/ and look-and-feel/ and installs four colour schemes, LichDark, MoeDark, Win11OSDark and Pastelred, alongside four Plasma desktop themes and look-and-feel packages, Ant-Dark, Moe-Dark, Red-pastel and Win11OS-dark.

The KWin module reads configs/plasma/kwinrc, kwinrulesrc and kglobalshortcutsrc and configures six virtual desktops in a 2x3 grid, the Krohnkite tiling engine, Darkly window decorations, 9-level blur, and global desktop hotkeys.

The six desktops in a 2x3 grid is a specific spatial choice rather than a row, and it is the layout the tiling hotkeys are designed around. Krohnkite is the tiling engine, and pairing a tiling engine with a grid of desktops is the combination a lot of tiling users end up with. The 9-level blur is a KWin effect setting.

The terminal and launcher modules follow the same pattern of matching the rest. The Konsole module installs three profiles, Sweet.profile, LichDark.profile and WhiteOnBlack.colorscheme, with 92 percent opacity for wallpaper bleed-through and a Hack font integration, so the terminal is translucent enough to show the wallpaper behind it. The Rofi module configures a translucent dark glass style at rgba(38,43,52,85 percent), rounded borders with an 11 pixel border radius, and the JetBrainsMono font.

The rest is application configs, a shell profile and a system info setup

Four modules remain, and they are the least interesting, which is a compliment in this context because they are the ones you would otherwise write by hand.

The application settings module reads from configs/apps/ and deploys custom settings for Dolphin, the KDE file manager, as a dolphinrc file, for Spectacle, the screenshot tool, as a spectaclerc, for Kate, the text editor, as a katevirc, and for Darkly window decorations, as a darklyrc. Four files, four applications, and each one is a configuration you would otherwise have to discover the format of.

The system info module reads configs/neofetch/config.conf and configs/fastfetch/config.jsonc, which are custom command line hardware information configurations. Two tools, both of which display a system summary at the terminal, both configured rather than left at their defaults.

The shell module reads configs/shell/.bashrc and installs a personal shell environment configuration with command aliases. This is the module with the widest blast radius and the least visible payoff, because a.bashrc replacement can shadow parts of your existing environment, and it is the one to look at line by line before installing.

The README also points to a detailed reference for technical gesture tuning, volume step size tweaks and emergency recovery hotkeys, which sits alongside the top level config directory. The licence position needs a note: the README carries an MIT badge and credits Lich, also known as Ahmad Hassan, while the repository's licence is listed as unknown. There are no GitHub releases, and the last push to the main branch was on 2026-07-29.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt LichArch if you run KDE Plasma 6 on Arch and want a complete, tuned desktop quickly, because the installer scripts are decoupled so you can take the OCR tool or the Konsole profiles without the rest, and the touchpad gesture module uses native in-compositor Wayland gestures rather than a helper daemon. Do not adopt it if you want a reusable theme, since the colour schemes and window decorations are tied to one author's layout, and do not run the master installer expecting an undo, since the scripts write into your Plasma, KWin and shell configuration. Before you start, read the individual module list and pick the pieces you want, and check the licence situation yourself, since the README badge claims MIT while the repository licence is listed as unknown.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. AhmadHassan-BTed/LichArch on GitHub
2. Issues
3. README