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Immersive fullscreen leaves a black strip above the guest on notched MacBook displays #294

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Immersive fullscreen leaves a black strip above the guest on notched MacBook displays#294

Description

@bevebkba
bevebkba
opened on Oct 2, 2026

Summary

When Try Omarchy runs full screen on a MacBook with a camera housing/notch, a black horizontal strip remains across the entire top of the display. The Omarchy guest starts below this strip, so the app does not use the full physical screen.

Environment

  • Try Omarchy: 0.4.0
  • Mac: Apple Silicon MacBook with a camera housing/notch
  • Display: built-in display
  • Finder > Get Info > “Scale to fit below built-in camera” is disabled

Steps to reproduce

  1. Launch Try Omarchy on the built-in MacBook display.
  2. Enter the app's full-screen/immersive presentation.
  3. Observe the top edge of the display.

Actual behavior

A solid black strip, approximately the height of the camera/menu-bar region, remains above the guest desktop. The guest wallpaper and top bar begin below it.

Expected behavior

The guest background/window should fill the complete display, including the auxiliary areas to the left and right of the camera housing. UI that must remain visible can still respect the safe area, but the whole top region should not be black.

Additional notes

Disabling macOS's “Scale to fit below built-in camera” option and restarting the app does not remove the strip. This may be related to sizing the guest drawable/window to the visible frame instead of the full screen frame, or to notch safe-area compatibility handling.

Screenshot

Try Omarchy fullscreen showing a black strip above the guest desktop

Activity

  1. Fail-Safe commented on Oct 5, 2026

    @Fail-Safe
    Fail-Safe
    on Oct 5, 2026
    Contributor

    Please see here for more information on the "why" around the black strip at the top:

    QEMU reduces the vertical pixel count down to a 16:10 ratio to avoid rendering up into the notch space at the top of the display. So it actually gets a 4112x2582px framebuffer.

  2. bevebkba commented on Oct 6, 2026

    @bevebkba
    bevebkba
    on Oct 6, 2026
    Author

    is there any way to make it complete fullscreen?

  3. gillesgoetsch commented on Oct 13, 2026

    @gillesgoetsch
    gillesgoetsch
    on Oct 13, 2026

    Maybe this would add some value to the conversation:

    OmacVM.app (also QEMU with HVF) covers this strip in full screen since 3.0.16. How it works, in case it helps:

    • macOS keeps a full-screen window below the camera housing. We hook AppKit's full-screen frame so the window gets the whole display, and make that Space's menu bar transparent (UTM does the same on macOS 27).
    • At each start the app measures the camera housing on the built-in screen and passes it to the guest, so Omarchy's bar sits in the strip, split around the notch, and windows start below it.
    • Other scales: the guest renders a size that fits its scale, a few pixels larger, and QEMU scales it onto the panel, so there's no black band at 1.25, 1.6 or 1.67.
    • Only on the built-in display; external displays keep normal full screen. If anything private changes, it falls back to normal full screen.

    The QEMU patches are omacvm-cocoa-fullpanel-logic.patch and omacvm-cocoa-fullpanel.patch, and the design notes are in docs/adr/0044-fullpanel.md. It was first built by @brianmerchant. Happy to help if you want to take the same route.

  4. Fail-Safe commented on Oct 18, 2026

    @Fail-Safe
    Fail-Safe
    on Oct 18, 2026
    Contributor

    Work in progress as of #361

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