4.5 KiB
China
Omarchy is built to work in mainland China without a VPN. Pick China on the first screen of the installer, the region picker that comes before the keyboard layout, and the machine comes up ready: Chinese menus and system language, a Chinese input method, Chinese package mirrors, and the Chinese software people actually need.
What China sets up
| Area | China | Global |
|---|---|---|
| Omarchy and Arch packages | pkgs.omarchy.cn and the *-mirror.omarchy.cn mirrors first, the .org servers right behind them |
.org servers only |
| Language | LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8, Chinese menu labels |
English |
| Input method | Fcitx5 with Rime Ice and the Wanxiang grammar model; Ctrl + Space toggles between Chinese and English |
Fcitx5 compose only |
| Developer mirrors | npm, PyPI and uv, Go, rustup and crates.io, RubyGems and Bundler, Maven | Upstream registries |
| Software | Install > China Apps and Setup > Claude Code API | Hidden |
Chinese text renders in the right Noto CJK variant everywhere: Simplified for Chinese, Traditional for Taiwan and Hong Kong, Japanese and Korean for those languages. That works in both regions.
Every package mirror lists the .cn server first and the .org server second. If the .cn mirror is unreachable, or a package is missing there, pacman falls through to .org, which works for anyone with their own VPN. pkgs.omarchy.cn serves the Omarchy packages today; until the Arch mirrors on stable-mirror.omarchy.cn and friends come online, Arch packages come from the .org servers.
Input
The installer sets up Rime Ice offline, from data bundled on the ISO, so Chinese input works the moment you log in. Rime is the active input method and Ctrl + Space switches to plain US keyboard input and back. The input method is installed by rime-ice-installer; run rime-ice-installer again any time to adjust it.
Developer mirrors
China machines point the common package managers at mirrors inside China. Environment variables in /etc/environment.d/90-omarchy-china.conf cover npm, PyPI and uv, Go, rustup, Bundler and Maven; they reach everything started from the desktop after your next login (not SSH or TTY shells), and they take precedence over npm, pip, uv and Go config files, so unset the variable in a shell to opt out. /.cargo/config.toml points crates.io at the mirror unless a project's .cargo/config.toml says otherwise, and /etc/gemrc sets the RubyGems source unless your ~/.gemrc sets another. Omarchy never replaces one of those two files if it is a regular file you created. Toolchain downloads by mise, such as Node.js or Go themselves, still come from upstream.
China Apps
Install > China Apps installs WeChat, QQ, Feishu, DingTalk, Tencent Meeting and WPS Office from the AUR, and sets up Tencent Docs, Yuque and Shimo as web apps.
Claude Code with a Chinese model
Setup > Claude Code API points Claude Code at DeepSeek, Kimi Code, GLM, MiniMax or any Anthropic-compatible endpoint. Pick a provider, paste its API key and confirm the model. The answers land in the env block of ~/.claude/settings.json. Kimi Code (kimi) and Dim Agent (dim) are preinstalled in every region; see AI.
Switching regions
Setup > Region switches an installed machine either way, or run omarchy region china or omarchy region global from a terminal. Switching to China first runs a full system update, so the input method installs against current packages, then installs the input method packages, records the region, moves the package mirrors to .cn and downloads Rime Ice. If the packages fail to install, the machine stays Global; if the Rime Ice download fails, China stays selected and running the switch again finishes it. The language and the developer mirrors follow at the next login, so the switch then offers to log out at once.
Switching to Global moves packages back to the .org servers, the language back to English, and removes the developer mirrors, China Apps and the Claude Code API setup. It keeps the input method and the CJK fonts, so you can still type and read Chinese. omarchy update never changes the region or the language; only these switches do.
A machine prepared for another owner keeps the region picked in the installer, and a factory reset returns a machine to the region it was installed with. Neither carries the input method's offline data, so pick Setup > Region > China once the machine is online; that setup downloads Rime Ice from GitHub.