Air raid alerts · Bar and screen
VartaOn the marketplace
An air raid alert watch that says when it has gone blind.
Your oblast in the bar, and a band across every screen the moment it goes under alert — built for the case where you are at the desk in headphones.
What only Varta does
Why this one
- It tells you when it has stopped watching.A monitor that cannot reach its source looks exactly like one reporting calm: the same quiet shield, the same silence. That is the failure that gets somebody hurt, so “not watching” is drawn in the warning colour and struck through, never greyed out and quietly forgotten.
- It notices a feed that has frozen, not just one that has stopped answering.Staleness is timed separately from the request succeeding, so a source still returning a cheerful 200 over a reading from an hour ago is caught. One really was, during development.
- It does not cry wolf.A watcher restarting after a settings change says “reconnecting”, not “not watching”, and closing the lid is recognised as sleep rather than an outage. A warning that fires when nothing is wrong stops being believed.
- Other oblasts are news, not alarm.Watch where your family live: it shows in the bar and sounds once, quietly, and never puts the band across your screen. Only where you are does that.
- The rehearsal is unmistakably a rehearsal.It runs the whole path — band, sound, repeat — marked ТЕСТ throughout, because a drill nobody can tell from the real thing is its own kind of harm.
Unofficial, and oblast-wide: a companion to the official app and to the sirens outside, never a replacement. It reads one public feed once a minute and writes nothing but its own entry in your shell config. Needs paplay for the sound; nothing else.
Using it
How you reach it
| Do this | And |
|---|---|
| Click the shield | Everything it knows, and everything you can do about it |
| Tick a region, Save | Watch somewhere else as well as where you are |
| Find my region | Detect your oblast again, from two sources that must agree |
| Test the alert | Rehearse the whole thing, clearly marked |
| The × on the band | Put it away for this alert, not for good |
Also on KDE Plasma In testing
Varta for Plasma 6
The band is a strip Plasma keeps above everything, full-screen video included, and alerts, all-clears and a lost feed are Plasma notifications too; the alert one stays until you dismiss it.
Then right click the panel, choose Add or Manage Widgets, and drag Varta onto it.
Until it is on the KDE Store it installs from its plasma branch.
Getting it
One command
Then restart the shell with omarchy-restart-shell. Licensed MIT;
remove it any time with omarchy plugin remove.