How to Customise Automatic Power Profiles

Power profiles are predefined configurations that control how a laptop balances performance, power consumption, heat, and fan noise. There are typically 3 power profiles to choose from: performance, balanced and power-saver.

You can view and change your power profile in Omarchy by clicking the battery icon in the top right corner of the Waybar. Your current power profile is displayed in italic characters.

Omarchy automatically sets the power profile to performance when the laptop is plugged in and balanced when it is running on battery. If this is how you want things to work, then you do not need to change anything.

My laptop fans sound like a plane about to take off when running in performance mode. Since I don’t run big workloads on my laptop anyway, I prefer to use balanced when plugged in and power-saver on battery.

Let’s see how we can tweak Omarchy to do just that. But before we start, make sure you are running Omarchy 3.5.1 or above

1. Rewrite the udev rule

Omarchy uses a udev rule named 99-power-profile.rules to trigger a command named omarchy-powerprofiles-set with the ac or battery argument, depending on whether the laptop is connected to a power supply or running on battery.

We could modify the command script directly, but I would advise against making changes in the Omarchy directory. That will make future system updates more complicated. Instead, we can safely override the command as explained in this blog post.

But first, let’s rewrite the udev rule to change the script location from ~/.local/share/omarchy/bin to ~/bin. Run this command in the terminal:

cat <<EOF | sudo tee "/etc/udev/rules.d/99-power-profile.rules" >/dev/null
SUBSYSTEM=="power_supply", ATTR{type}=="Mains", ATTR{online}=="0", RUN+="/usr/bin/systemd-run --no-block --collect --unit=omarchy-power-profile-battery --property=After=power-profiles-daemon.service $HOME/bin/omarchy-powerprofiles-set battery"
SUBSYSTEM=="power_supply", ATTR{type}=="Mains", ATTR{online}=="1", RUN+="/usr/bin/systemd-run --no-block --collect --unit=omarchy-power-profile-ac --property=After=power-profiles-daemon.service $HOME/bin/omarchy-powerprofiles-set ac"
EOF

2. Override the omarchy-powerprofiles-set command

Now we need to create the omarchy-powerprofiles-set script in ~/bin. That script will override the default Omarchy command. Here’s the content of my script. You can adjust the power profiles to your liking.

#!/bin/bash

# Usage: omarchy-powerprofiles-set <ac|battery>

case "$1" in
  ac)
    powerprofilesctl set balanced
    ;;
  battery)
    powerprofilesctl set power-saver
    ;;
esac~/bin/omarchy-powerprofiles-set

Make the script executable:

chmod +x ~/bin/omarchy-powerprofiles-set

3. Make sure ~/bin is in the PATH

The udev rule above points directly to ~/bin/omarchy-powerprofiles-set, but Omarchy also calls omarchy-powerprofiles-set by name in other places.

If you want your custom script to override the default one everywhere, make sure the system reads the ~/bin directory before ~/.local/share/omarchy/bin. We do that by prepending $HOME/bin to the PATH variable in .bashrc and ~/.config/uwsm/env:

echo 'export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.config/uwsm/env

It does not have to be ~/bin. That’s just my personal preference. You can use ~/.local/bin instead, but you still need to make sure it comes before Omarchy’s bin folder in the PATH.

You can view the current PATH with this command:

echo $PATH

4. Do not forget to test it

Reload the udev rules:

sudo udevadm control --reload

Now plug and unplug your laptop and verify that the active power profile matches the one you expect:

powerprofilesctl get

With a little bit of work, you can really customise just about anything in Omarchy.