omarchy-surface-tablet

Tablet mode for Omarchy on the Microsoft Surface Pro 4, without switching away from the stock Arch kernel.

• Touchscreen via the linux-surface IPTS driver, packaged as a DKMS module so it rebuilds on every kernel update
• Floating on-screen keyboard styled like Omarchy windows, with Super and Alt on the main row and swipe typing
• Auto-rotation of the screen, touch input and keyboard
• Touch gestures with hyprgrass

Why not the linux-surface kernel?

The SP4 needs linux-surface's IPTS driver for touch, which isn't in mainline. At the time of writing the linux-surface kernel lagged at 6.19 while Arch was on 7.2. The driver itself builds unchanged against current kernels, and the stock kernel already detects the touch controller, so it only needs the driver as a module. You keep normal kernel updates; if a future kernel ever breaks the build, only touch stops working until the driver is fixed.

Multi-touch

In its default mode the SP4 touch firmware reports one finger at a time. iptsd, installed from the linux-surface repo, switches it to multi-touch and handles the pen. iptsd 3.1.0's built-in contact thresholds miss fingertips on the SP4, so iptsd/90-sp4-contacts.conf sets them back to the documented values (iptsd#210).

Touch does not come back by itself after sleep: the driver has no suspend support and probes before the touch controller is ready. systemd/ipts-reload is installed as a sleep hook that reloads it. If touch is ever dead after a resume and reloading the driver hangs, the Intel ME is wedged and only a reboot clears it.

Install

Requires Omarchy (Hyprland 0.56+ with Lua config) on a Surface Pro 4.

git clone https://github.com/mcinnisdev/omarchy-surface-tablet
cd omarchy-surface-tablet
./install.sh

Then log out and back in.

Gestures

Gesture	Action
Swipe up from the bottom edge	Show or hide the keyboard
Swipe down from the top edge	Omarchy menu
Three fingers left or right	Switch workspace
Three fingers down	Close window
Three fingers up	Scratchpad
Hold two fingers, then drag	Move window
Long-press a window border	Resize
Four-finger tap	Toggle rotation lock

These are the defaults. To see, add, change or remove gestures, open Omarchy menu → Setup → Gestures (or run tablet-gestures). Pick a gesture type, the fingers or edge, and a direction, then an action from the list or any shell command. Gestures are stored in ~/.config/hypr/tablet-gestures.json and tablet-gestures list prints them.

Keyboard

The keyboard is a fork of wvkbd, built from the tablet branch of mcinnisdev/wvkbd. It adds:

• a floating, centered panel with rounded corners and a border
• LAYOUT=tablet, with Sup and Alt on the main row (modifiers latch, so tap Sup then Space for the Omarchy menu)
• built-in swipe typing: a shape-based decoder that compares your finger's path with each word's path across the keys, weighted by word frequency. Backspace right after a swiped word deletes the whole word.

tablet-keyboard starts it with colors from the current Omarchy theme:

tablet-keyboard toggle   # show or hide
tablet-keyboard restart  # pick up theme or setting changes

Size, transparency, border and font are set at the top of ~/.local/bin/tablet-keyboard.

Swipe word list

install.sh builds ~/.local/share/tablet-keyboard/swipe-words.tsv from SCOWL (Arch's words package) ranked by Peter Norvig's word counts. Raise a word's count to make it win more often. Neither source is redistributed here; both are fetched at install time.

Menus

Omarchy's menu covers the whole screen and holds exclusive keyboard focus, so while a menu is open it hides the on-screen keyboard and Hyprland sends every touch to the menu instead of the keyboard. Typing to filter a menu therefore needs a physical keyboard.

tablet-menu-sync installs a copy of Omarchy's menu plugin that fixes both (it stays clear of the keyboard's reserved space and asks for on-demand focus), but it is not installed by default: Omarchy only hands its application library to first-party plugins, so a cloned menu shows an empty Apps submenu. Run tablet-menu-sync if you want menu typing by touch and can live without the Apps list; tablet-menu-sync remove goes back to the built-in menu.

Auto-rotation

tablet-autorotate follows iio-sensor-proxy and rotates the screen, touch input and keyboard together. The rotation is kept in $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/tablet-rotation, so it survives Hyprland config reloads. Toggle rotation lock with a four-finger tap or tablet-autorotate lock.

Known limitations

• Only tested on a Surface Pro 4. Other IPTS Surfaces might work with the same driver but are untested.
• The Surface Pen shows up through iptsd but hasn't been tested.
• hyprgrass is still alpha.

Credits and license

• driver/ipts: Intel Precise Touch & Stylus driver from linux-surface, © Dorian Stoll and Intel, GPL-2.0-or-later
• wvkbd: © its authors, GPL-3.0
• Everything else in this repo: GPL-3.0, see LICENSE