Signed on Omarchy

Signed on Omarchy

Signed is a free (MIT), Omacom-built PDF signing app for Omarchy — open a PDF, drop your signature, text, or today’s date anywhere on a page, and save a signed copy, optionally sealed with a self-signed digital certificate.

TL;DR

omarchy pkg add signed

Takes under a minute — it’s a 207.6 KB download. Version 0.3.1-1, maintained by Omacom (the Omarchy team’s own org) since October 11, 2026. Launch it with signed open or signed open lease.pdf, or find it in the launcher. Modeled on the signing tools in Apple’s Preview, and nothing more: no PDF editing, no form filling, no bloat.

Getting started (5 minutes)

1. Install and open a PDF.

omarchy pkg add signed, then signed open some.pdf (Ctrl+O opens from inside the app). The interface follows your Omarchy theme’s accent color.

2. Add your signature.

Open the Signature menu and choose Add signature…, or just drop an image on the window. Use a scan or a well-lit photo of your signature on white paper — Signed removes the paper, keeps the ink (blue stays blue), and crops to it. If shadows sneak in, slide Paper threshold toward More; if faint strokes disappear, slide toward Less. PNGs that are already transparent are used as-is. Name it (“Alex Morgan”, “Initials”), and it’s saved to ~/.local/share/signed/signatures/ for reuse.

3. Place things.

Press S for your last-used signature, T for a text box, D for today’s date (in your locale’s format, editable as ordinary text). Drag to move, drag a corner to scale, double-click text to edit it again. Signatures and text remember the size you last gave them.

4. Save a signed copy.

Ctrl+S writes <name>-signed.pdf beside the original. The original is never changed — Signed refuses to save over it. The signed copy keeps the original pages exactly as they were (text stays selectable, nothing re-rendered) with your items laid on top. Placed items stay editable until you close the PDF, so you can fix a misplaced signature and save again.

5. Seal it (optional).

When adding a signature, turn on Digital seal: create a self-signed certificate for it (named after the signature, optional organization), reuse an existing one, or Import a .p12 file… from elsewhere. A sealed copy carries an invisible PKCS#7 signature over the whole document, the kind every PDF viewer understands, so any change made after you saved it shows up in the viewer. Honest caveat: these certs are self-signed, so the seal proves the file wasn’t changed, not who signed it — most viewers will report “unknown signer.” Certs live unencrypted in ~/.local/share/signed/certificates/, so anyone on the machine can seal with them.

6. The three things everyone needs to know:

• It works from the command line, with no display. signed signatures lists saved signatures; signed add-signature "Initials" photo.jpg saves one; signed pages lease.pdf lists page sizes in points; signed text lease.pdf --page 4 dumps each text box; signed render lease.pdf --page 4 --grid -o p4.png renders a page with a 50-point grid. The big one: signed sign lease.pdf lease-signed.pdf --items items.json places a signature by name, text, or today’s date at coordinates from the top-left — it validates every item first and reports all problems at once, never writing over the original. Add --json for structured output, exit 0 on success / 1 on failure. signed help <command> documents options; signed help items prints the whole items.json format.
• It teaches your agents. signed skill install copies a short Signed skill to ~/.agents/skills/signed/ (Codex) and links it into ~/.claude/skills/ (Claude Code), so a coding agent can sign PDFs for you headlessly. signed skill prints it instead.
• Hotkeys are the whole UI philosophy. S / Shift+S for signatures, T for text, D for date, arrows (Shift = 10 pt) to nudge, [ / ] to resize, Ctrl+D to duplicate, Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z for undo/redo, ? shows the hotkey list in-app. Letter keys do nothing while typing.

Common issues & fixes

No user-reported issues existed on the GitHub tracker as of 2026-10-18 (repo created 2026-10-11, 20 commits, 0 open / 0 closed issues). Everything below is from the README’s own documented limits and requirements — real constraints, just not user reports yet. None of these are claimed as reproduced.

A password-protected PDF won’t open

Fix: This is a documented limit, not a bug: Signed can’t open encrypted PDFs. Decrypt it first (e.g. with qpdf --decrypt, which is already a Signed dependency: qpdf --password=<pw> --decrypt locked.pdf open.pdf) and sign the decrypted copy.

You can’t fill in the PDF’s form fields

Fix: Also a documented limit: form fields are not filled as fields. Place text over them instead (T, click, type). The underlying PDF keeps its original form fields as-is — Signed lays text on top of the page.

You want to draw your signature with the mouse

Fix: There is no mouse-drawing tool. Signatures come from images only (scan, photo, or transparent PNG). The README explicitly models this on Apple’s Preview and says “and nothing more.”

The file picker doesn’t open, or opening a PDF fails

Fix: Signed’s requirements list includes xdg-desktop-portal and a portal backend for the file picker. Omarchy ships this, so it should work out of the box — but if you’ve removed portals, the picker is the thing that breaks. Reinstall via omarchy pkg add xdg-desktop-portal (verify on-machine). Not reported by any user; this is from the requirements section.

A viewer says your sealed PDF’s signer is “unknown”

Fix: Expected: Signed’s certificates are self-signed. The seal proves the file is unchanged (PKCS#7 over the whole document), not who signed it — it is not a qualified electronic signature (QES). If you need legal-grade signatures, import a real .p12 certificate via Import a .p12 file… instead.

Pairs well with / If you hate this, try

Pairs well with

• Claws (omarchy pkg add claws) or your mail app for the signed contracts that leave by email; qpdf (already a dependency) for decrypting PDFs before signing; a scanning app on your phone for capturing the signature image.

If you hate this, try

• Xournal++ (omarchy pkg add xournalpp) — annotates PDFs freehand but doesn’t do the PKCS#7 seal; or the Chrome PDF viewer, which signs nothing and just lets you fill forms.

Comparison: signed vs similar apps

Verdict: Pick Signed if you want the Apple-Preview-style signature workflow — drop, place, save, seal — plus a CLI that scripts and agents can use; pick Xournal++ if you mostly need to write on PDFs by hand.