In open developmentEst. 2026Tools, never signals · not investment advice
ALPHARCH.
A Linux operating system for the futures trader
pronounced alpha-arch
ES 6421.00 +0.55NQ 23,214.25 +0.69CL 71.44 −0.61GC 3,388.4 +0.52VIX 14.31SPX Γ-FLIP 6390 · CALL WALL 6450ZN 112'045BTC 118,61210Y 4.18%CPI 2.8 — COOLER THAN EXPECTEDDXY 97.62QUOTATIONS ILLUSTRATIVE — A SPECIMEN TRADING DAY, NOT A LIVE FEEDES 6421.00 +0.55NQ 23,214.25 +0.69CL 71.44 −0.61GC 3,388.4 +0.52VIX 14.31SPX Γ-FLIP 6390 · CALL WALL 6450ZN 112'045BTC 118,61210Y 4.18%CPI 2.8 — COOLER THAN EXPECTEDDXY 97.62QUOTATIONS ILLUSTRATIVE — A SPECIMEN TRADING DAY, NOT A LIVE FEED
The desk assembles itself, and it reads the tape with you.
We are building an operating system with one customer in mind: the trader who reads order flow and options flow, and who is tired of spending the best minutes of the morning launching software.
Every trading session has the same shape. The same charts in the same places, the same execution platform, the same research, at the same times, every day. Alpharch treats that shape as the operating system's job. By 7:30 each morning it has already written your desk sheet, with the overnight session, the key levels, the dealer positioning map and your plan drawn from your own playbook. At 8:00, one keypress raises the entire desk: footprints on the first screen, execution on the second, research on the third. When the bell rings you are reading the market, not arranging windows.
It is built as a fork of Omarchy, the most consequential Linux desktop project in years, and it is being designed in the open, blueprint first. The install command below is honest about its status: the desk you see on this page exists as a complete working specification, now being built.
❯ trade-desk open In blueprint · follow the build · ISO at phase three
Plate I. The Daily, generated at 07:30 while you slept: overnight Globex with chart, a key-levels ladder with confluences called out, dealer positioning, the expected move, and a plan skeleton prefilled from the trader's own playbook rules.
II.The flagship
It has read every tick. Ask it anything.
No one can watch the footprint, the order book, the options tape and the internals at once. The Narrator can, and does, all session long.
It sits on the same data streams as every chart on the desk: each print, each iceberg, each pulled bid, each sweep and block, the live gamma map, the internals, your marked levels, and your own playbook file. When you ask, it answers out loud, in seconds, in your vocabulary. Your hands never leave the ladder. No charting platform offers this. No retail terminal offers this. It boots with the operating system.
You, by voice · 10:07:12
"Flow check."
The Narrator · 10:07:14
"Last twelve minutes: two absorption events at 6428, the overnight high held both times. CVD is diverging on this push. Zero-DTE call volume is building at 6440 and the wall has migrated up. TICK averaging +420, bonds bid, NQ leading. Your A-setup zone sits five points below."
You · 10:07:39
"Confluence check on the long."
The Narrator · 10:07:41
"Three of four supportive: bonds bid, NQ leading, VIX fading; the dollar is flat. Per your playbook, A-grade requires three or more. It qualifies. Sizing and trigger are yours."
Quiet by default
It speaks in three cases only: when you ask; when a watch you armed fires ("tell me if 6390 gets tested," and you hear how it traded, absorbed or sliced); or in narrate mode, for a stretch you choose, after which it goes silent again.
Your vocabulary, not commentary
It reads your playbook file, so it answers in your setups' names and restates your rules at the moment they apply. Voice runs locally in both directions.
Structurally unable to trade
Read-only streams and no path to the order ticket. It describes; it never advises. A tape-reading assistant that makes calls is a signal service with your account attached, and the Narrator is built so it cannot become one.
Plate II. The Narrator beside a live ES footprint at 10:07. A spoken flow check has just been answered; the armed watches are listed beneath the transcript. It reads everything and orders nothing.
"You physically cannot watch everything at once. Now you don't have to."
The case for a narrated tape
III.A day at the desk
One trading day, as the system runs it.
Time
Event
What happens
07:30
The Daily is written
The desk sheet is generated before you sit down: overnight recap, levels with confluences, the dealer map, the expected move, and your plan prefilled from your own rules. On CPI days, the print is flagged with a countdown.
08:00
The desk assembles
One keypress. Charts, execution, research, and the flow tape each launch to their own workspace; monitors arrange; data goes live; focus lands on the footprint.
09:30
You are reading, not launching
The bell rings on a desk that has been working for ninety minutes. The bar counts down every session transition, Globex reopen to settlement, so you never do clock arithmetic again.
10:07
A flow check
The Narrator summarizes twelve minutes of tape in one breath, and checks your confluence rule on request. See Plate II.
16:10
The Debrief finds you
The Daily's evening twin writes itself: your fills annotated on the session, rule adherence scored against your playbook, every entry already logged with the footprint, internals, and gamma state it happened in.
IV.The machinery
Futures first.Flow underneath everything.
The market, two keystrokes away.A switcher opens on the futures catalog grouped by exchange: CME equity index, CBOT rates and grains, NYMEX energy, COMEX metals. Front months resolve automatically, days-to-roll sit beside every contract, and micros are one keystroke from their full-size siblings.
Order flow as the default view.Footprints, cumulative delta and volume profile form the standard chart workspace, through MotiveWave running natively or Sierra Chart under a tested compatibility layer. The system also watches the tape itself: large-lot prints, icebergs, pulled liquidity, absorption, and delta divergence, raised as alerts tied to your marked levels.
A living gamma map.The options-flow engine computes the call wall, put wall and gamma flip before the open, then keeps them alive intraday as zero-DTE volume rebuilds the landscape, with an estimate of forced dealer hedging when a level breaks.
A desk that remembers.Every fill is journaled automatically with its full market context, and the analytics answer questions worth asking: which setups pay, at which times, under which conditions. Daily loss limits are enforced by the operating system itself.
Plate III. The flow workspace at 08:42: ES footprint with bid-and-ask imbalances marked, the options-flow tape at right, and the gamma exposure map beneath it.Plate IV. The market switcher, summoned from anywhere: the CME Group catalog, fuzzy-searched, with front months and roll countdowns.
V.Your battlestation
Build your battlestation.
This is Arch country: the desk is yours to make unmistakably yours. One command rethemes everything at once — charts, terminals, bar, lock screen — every Omarchy community theme works unmodified, and the whole setup lives in config files you can version, share, and show off. Tinker forever, or never touch it: the curated set below ships ready.
Theme
Specimen
Character
The Pit
The flagship. Bloomberg amber on deep blue-black, the glow of the machines that started this business. Every plate on this page wears it.
Quotron
Green phosphor, the other ancestral terminal. For traders whose first quote screen still haunts them fondly.
Globex
The overnight palette: dimmer, deeper, easy on 2 a.m. eyes. The desk can switch into it by itself when the evening session opens, driven by the same clock as the bar.
Paper
Daylight, as in paper trading — and as in the page you are reading, which is set in it.
Tape
Monochrome newsprint; only the market gets color. For minimalists and Berkshire shareholders.
Any of them, colorblind-safe
Every theme ships a deuteranopia-safe variant — direction in blue and orange, one command to swap, propagated to every chart and widget at once. One trader in twelve cannot separate red from green; in this profession that is a safety issue, not a preference.
One contract binds them all: direction colors mean direction, nowhere else. Themes that honor the full contract are trading-certified; the rest of the Omarchy catalog gets sensible automatic mappings.
And the best part is a trick inherited from Omarchy itself: you are not limited to a catalog. Describe a theme to the desk's agent in plain language — a mood, an era, a machine you miss — and it builds the entire thing: palette, terminals, charts, bar, lock screen, with the direction contract honored automatically.
❯ "build me a theme like a 1980s Tokyo dealing room — indigo night, hot magenta tape" A minute later it exists, everywhere at once, trading-certified
VI.Provenance
Standing on the biggest thingto hit Linux in years.
A word on the foundation, for readers who don't follow the Linux world. In 2025, David Heinemeier Hansson, the programmer behind Ruby on Rails and Basecamp, released Omarchy: a finished, opinionated desktop built on Arch Linux that compressed weeks of expert configuration into a twenty-minute install, and made an AI assistant part of the operating system itself. It became the fastest-moving project in desktop Linux and is now backed by its own foundation.
This matters to a trader for one reason. The hard engineering underneath Alpharch — the installer, the update pipeline, the theming system, the AI plumbing — belongs to that well-funded upstream project and its team. We build the one thing they never will: the trading desk on top. The foundation has an organization behind it. The desk has a single purpose. You get both.
Base systemArch Linux · Hyprland
UpstreamOmarchy (friendly fork)
Install≈ 20 minutes
Upstream backing$8M foundation
AI integrationNative, fenced
License & buildOpen, forkable
VII.Plain statements
What we will not pretend.
On latency: retail order flow travels hundreds of milliseconds to a broker, and no kernel patch changes that. What ships instead is what matters at that distance: truthful clocks, a machine that never sleeps mid-session, and a power-failure plan.
On Windows-only platforms: some trading software will simply never run on Linux. IBKR runs natively here, TradingView runs accelerated, and Sierra Chart runs well under a tested compatibility layer — but Quantower, NinjaTrader and their class stay on Windows, and we say so here rather than in a footnote.
On data: real depth and live options flow are paid feeds, and the free tier is honest about being an approximation rather than dressing it up.
On tilt: the profit-and-loss readout ships disabled. Watching unrealized P&L all day is how accounts die; turning it on is a decision, not a default.
On the assistant: it analyzes everything and advises on nothing. No orders, no signals, no exceptions, by architecture rather than by policy.
VIII.Follow the build
Trade the open, not the setup.
Alpharch is being built in public, specification first. The overlay lands on stock Omarchy this fall; the installable system follows when it has earned it.
❯ git clone [repository — phase four] The address will live here when there is something worth cloning
